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Hearme questions
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Hearme questions |
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Subject: Hearme questions From: Jon Freeman Date: 16 Oct 00 - 06:34 AM I was asked a few questions about Hearme during the Llanstock gathering and felt that it may be useful to post this. Hearme is a voice communication program that has become very popular with Mudcatters and the room provided by Aine here is regularly used for song circles by Mudcatters world wide. Anyone can start off a session and this is often done by creating a thread in Mudcat to inform others that someone is in their waiting for some company. There is a separate Mudcat Concert room on Aine's page which is fairly new and has been used by individuals to give a performance of say around 50 minutes. Big Chuck is maintaining a schedule for this room so if anyone is willing to give a performance, send him a PM and he will put you in the calendar. Also check the Mudcat Hearme Concert thread. The question of times has often cropped up but a Hearme even can occur at any time, it just seems that the American contingent are better organised than some of us say in the UK. If anyone wishes to start something at a time more suited to their hours, please do so. Hearme does not require a high spec machine. Their minimum spec is:
Windows 95/98/2000/NT but I believe people have got away with a lower spec than this if only to listen and join in with the text chat. Unfortunately, Hearme only offer PC/ Windows support. The best advice I can give to anyone who has this setup and is running the required browsers is just to enter the Hearme room and see what happens. The first time you enter a Hearme room, you will be prompted to accept the installation of a small plugin and to agree to a licence agreement. This process is usually completed in less than 5 minutes but if you get a grey screen for ages, please be patient. A few people have asked about mikes. As far as I understand it, people have achieved good results using cheap mikes and there have been suggestions that cheaper mikes have actually outperformed more expensive models for this application. Another question is a means of holding down the F9 key to talk. There have been a number of approaches to this which include tape, toes, staplers, capos, etc. I have made a software solution available here. Regarding problems, Hearme's technical support has been poor and it has recently been reported by a couple of users that they have not even received a reply. If anything does go wrong, it seems that one stands a better chance of posting to Mudcat and hoping that one of us can come up with an answer that dealing with Hearme themselves. Jon |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: dwditty Date: 16 Oct 00 - 07:04 AM Jon, You have done a great service to the Mudcat by setting this up. And thanks Aine for keeping it going. Just about any time of day I can go to hearme and, if no one is there, just camp out and wait. Usually within 3-5 minutes, someone shows up...then another...and another. Pretty soon it's a crowd. Don't forget to start a thread if you decide to hang out there. Try it! dw |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: Jon Freeman Date: 16 Oct 00 - 08:38 AM Thanks dw but I was just another link in the chain. I think I remember reading JAB saying that he had no idea what Hearme was going to turn into when he first suggested it and I must admit that I had suspected that it was going to be a passing whim rather than a regular meeting point. I think what must be remembered is that it is everybody who has made Hearme what it is and I particulary appreciate the efforts of those who have spent long hours in there always willing to give a song. If I was to single one person out for doing that and regularly posting to say someone was in the room it is Mbo, particulary in the early days and his contribution to making the Hearme into a reality can not be underestimated. Jon |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: Áine Date: 16 Oct 00 - 08:47 AM Thanks for the FAQ reminder, Jon. And again, thanks for all your hard work and patience in answering everyone's questions about Hearme, and giving me your continuing assistance in keeping the page up-to-date and user-friendly -- well, as best as we can ;-). -- Áine |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: bigchuck Date: 16 Oct 00 - 10:04 AM I have been meaning to post a few thoughts on the sound quality of HearMe for some time now. This may be the right place to do it. When I began to set up the hearme concerts, Midchuck and I spent some time in the concert room playing with sound adjustments. At that time, I had 2 studio quality mikes (AKG C1000 and AKG C3000)plugged into our Carvin Mixer and the monitor line out plugged into the sound card. This is basically the set-up that we used for the first concert. I now think that we might have been better off using individual dynamic vocal mikes and no instrumental mike or just the C1000. The C3000 is too sensitive and picks up too much of the room noise. It also was too small a room to really get any balance between the singers (although some would say that we are pretty unbalanced anyway). At any rate, I suspect that most computer sound cards of the cheaper variety are very easy to overdrive, which causes muddiness and distortion. Midchuck and I found that the best sound for our setup appeared to result when the input volume was set quite low (in fact, I had it set almost off at the soundcard)and the sound level at the receiving computer set fairly high. This seems to be particularly true of the cheap mics offered at computer stores. The difficulty of course, is that you can't really hear the results of your own tinkering. The audio configuration utility is of _very_ limited fidelity. When doing a regular HearMe, I have been using the C1000 set fairly low at my end and plugged directly into the computer. I would like to hear from HearMe participants with better soundcards and speaker setups as I suspect that they may get better sound than the rest of us. Sandy |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: bigchuck Date: 16 Oct 00 - 09:03 PM Refresh |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: bigchuck Date: 17 Oct 00 - 08:49 PM fresh |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: Grab Date: 18 Oct 00 - 02:11 PM I'm intrigued by HearMe. My net connection at home isn't the world's greatest and tends to hang up every so often. How much buffering is there in there? And is it practical over a phone line, or is it really just suited to broadband? Grab. |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: MMario Date: 18 Oct 00 - 02:17 PM I use HearMe over a phone line, in fact over a pretty poor phone line...and I am told the quality of sound is from "okay" to "good" - and reception is usually pretty good. The times I have trouble I have trouble with ANYTHING on the net; though occasionaly I will notice a gap if I am downloading a number of pages while listening. Can't fault the 'puter for that, nor HearMe, since I KNOW my lines are limited. |
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Subject: RE: Hearme questions From: Jon Freeman Date: 18 Oct 00 - 04:41 PM Grab, in terms of connection speeds, the worst case I know of is Jeri who has a 56K modem but can only get a 28.8K connection with her ISP and she sounds great. There are more issues than a simple connection speed though, others with seemingly faster connection speeds seem to come through worse and I can only guess that this is due to a particular internet route and web traffic (MMario will know more about traffic than me). Try it and see what happens. Jon |
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