Author: Robby Burns

New restructuring here on the blog and podcast

Until last Sunmer, I hosted the Music Ed Tech Talk podcast here on SquareSpace, as a separate blog page from this one. In August, I moved my podcast to Libsyn but continued to cross post the episodes to that SquareSpace blog so that episodes would have a nice place on the web that looked like it was in a consistent style with the rest of my website.

Having two SquareSpace blogs here seemed redundant. So I have combined the podcast with this blog and now they are both called Music Ed Tech Talk. It will make no difference to readers and listeners. Everything is just under the same hood. Subscribers to the blog will get blog posts each time a publish a podcast episode, containing the show notes and a web player to listen from the web. Listeners to the show can continue to use the same feed to get just the episodes in their podcast player of choice.

If you click Blog in the navigation of my website, or type musicedtechtalk.com, it willl take you here, where you can see all posts and episodes. If you click podcasts in the nav bar, and select Music Ed Tech Talk, it will no longer take you to the old, secondary, blog I was using for the podcast. Now it will take you to this blog, but with the podcast category filtered, so you only see episodes once you scroll below whatever blog post is featured at the top.

I’m not sure if anyone cares about these details except for me, but it sure does feel good not to be posting all of my new podcast episodes to SquareSpace two times. I am leaving the old podcast blog site up because it still gets search hits on the web, but I have de-linked it from this site.

By the way, if you haven’t, you should subscribe to the blog and podcast using the appropriate links in the sidebar. You can now subscribe to these posts in a weekly email!

Routing Audio from Your Apps Directly Into Your Zoom Call (Or Other Voice Chat App) with Loopback

UPDATE: Learn more about Loopback from my interview with CEO Paul Kafasis on my podcast. Listen and subscribe below…

Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyRSS Feed

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Loopback is an app that creates custom audio ins and outs for the Mac using the audio of other apps.</p></div>
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Have you been teaching a class in Google Meet or Zoom and wanted to play a song from iTunes for your digital classroom? Or perhaps a YouTube video or any other application with audio?

Sure, you can play it right on your computer and let the audio from your speakers go straight back into the microphone input of your computer. This works ok in my opinion. But it isn’t going to produce a pure representation of the audio I am trying to send. And in some cases, it creates issues with echo, delay, or a nasty feedback loop.

So what do you do? Rogue Amoeba makes excellent Mac apps that, for lack of better explanation, hack into the audio system of your Mac. I have written about Audio Hijack here before, their app that allows you to record audio from other applications (and that’s just the start of all the powerful things it can do). Rogue Amoeba also makes an excellent utility called Loopback.

What does Loopback do? Think about your computer’s audio settings. You have an Input and an Output. The Input is, by default, your computer microphone, and the Output is the speakers. If you connect an audio interface that has higher quality microphone and speakers plugged in, you would need to set the Input and Output to that interface to get the input and out put the be the microphone and speakers, respectively.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1595453574122-OW83Y83K7XW3RVX5EOY1/CleanShot+2020-07-22+at+17.31.48%402x.png" alt="Usually my computer microphone is a Device that can be set to the computer’s Input. In the scenario above, Loopback has allowed me to combine the audio from my microphone and the Music app into a new audio Device called “Music+Mic” that can be selec…" width="2224" height="1224" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Usually my computer microphone is a Device that can be set to the computer’s Input. In the scenario above, Loopback has allowed me to combine the audio from my microphone and the Music app into a new audio Device called “Music+Mic” that can be selected as the input of my Mac or any individual app.</p></div>
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Your Inputs and Outputs can be controlled from the Sound settings of your computer. Some audio apps also let you control how, specifically, they behave. For example, I have manually set up GarageBand and Skype to use my audio interface as the Device I use for input so that whether I am recording for my podcast, or simply catching up with a relative, they hear me through the microphone, no matter what Device my Mac’s audio Output is set to in the System Preferences.

Loopback allows you to create Inputs and Outputs that are accessible to your Mac’s Sound settings as well as your apps. In the example above, I have created an Input that combines my Mac’s microphone (the usual Input) with the output of the Apple Music app, something I might want to use to play a recording example for my students in a Google Meet.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1595452699201-P28K84NUK3AWBKDPOE50/CleanShot+2020-07-22+at+17.06.46%402x.png" alt="Selecting my new audio Device from the System Preferences." width="1560" height="1220" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Selecting my new audio Device from the System Preferences.</p></div>
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Look now as I go to my computer’s Sound settings, and I can select this new custom Input to be used across the entire operating system! This way, when I am in a Google Meet, students are hearing both me speaking through the mic and all of the output of the Music app.

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            <img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5595df9ce4b0ce9ff9ecd1a8/1595452726313-QK1V1G3GMW9N3C0GMI23/CleanShot+2020-07-22+at+17.06.14%402x.png" alt="Now I can route my band warm up tracks, reference recordings, or any other audio I desire, into my Google Meet classrooms." width="2500" height="1563" style="display:block;object-fit: cover;width: 100%;height: 100%;object-position: 50% 50%" loading="lazy">

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        <div class="image-caption"><p class="">Now I can route my band warm up tracks, reference recordings, or any other audio I desire, into my Google Meet classrooms.</p></div>
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🔗 Choir Creator: All-in-One Virtual Ensemble Maker App, Shipping Next Month on iOS

New app for creating virtual ensembles coming next month. Click the link to read more information directly from the developer’s website and sign up to be notified when it is released.

Choir Creator: The All-in-One Virtual Choir Builder:

Choir Creator is the easiest way to organize and produce a virtual choir video. Releasing to the United States and Canada in August 2020 for iPhone and iPad running iOS 12.4 or later.

From the YouTube demo on the developer’s website, it looks like the workflow solves nearly all of the friction of this process. The business model of charging the teacher a considerable (but reasonable) amount of money and nothing to the student is solid.

That said, this process does not leave a lot of room for control. I would like to be able to, for example, turn up the tuba if it isn’t loud enough. I can think of numerous other ways that I would want to exercise more control than the output of this app would allow. That said, there is a strong market for software that makes it this easy. I think it may do well.

It’s iOS only at launch, which is not a surprise, but will limit school systems where students are using Chromebooks.

Edit: I have spoken with the developers of this app. They informed me that Choir Creator will support basic audio editing features at launch, like changing the volume and panning of each track. They said they have more audio editing features to come. Good to know!

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