Using scsynth on Windows with Zoom?

Iannis_Zannos · November 27, 2020, 6:32am

Hello,
since teaching in Greece is currently online via Zoom, we have many
students that use SuperCollider on Windows. While booting scsynth
on MacOS with zoom connected and sharing computer audio is no problem,
on Windows all of the users experience a freezing of audio when
booting scsynth.
Is there a way to share computer audio on zoom and boot scsynth on Windows?
Note: I have seen a similar topic by @MarcinP and will respond there to
put students in touch for testing his audio device selection work.

Best regards,

Iannis Zannos

Iannis_Zannos · November 27, 2020, 6:34am

Hello Marcin,

I will recommend your post to students of related classes at Greek Uni’s
that I know. I hope that this will help.
Cheers,
Iannis Zannos

shiihs · November 27, 2020, 7:34am

May I suggest to include a link to said post?

jamshark70 · November 27, 2020, 9:02am

I saw this problem myself but I was unable to solve it.

hjh

Iannis_Zannos · November 27, 2020, 9:12am

Sure. My omission - I was meaning to post this answer to MarcinP’s post.
Here is the link:

Iannis

Iannis_Zannos · November 27, 2020, 11:00am

This is sad news, but it is good to know this from an experienced sc programmer. Thanks @jamshark70.

dkmayer · November 27, 2020, 2:57pm

I’m using SC + Zoom from a Mac (with an old 10.10), but these points might be worth a try on Windows as well.

.) start SC before Zoom

.) select 48 kHz for the mic in your system settings

.) select the Zoom device from SC (check if this is the right name on Windows)

s.options.outDevice = “ZoomAudioD”;
s.reboot;

.) start Zoom

I avoid using any other audio software at the same time, even before the session. It happened twice that I opened an audio editor with the result that SC + Zoom didn’t work anymore before a restart of the computer.

Daniel

luka · December 2, 2020, 2:26pm

I’m not on windows, but it’s an important question. Can ZOOM use ASIO on windows? Then maybe using jack server could help?

https://jackaudio.org/faq/jack_on_windows.html

Iannis_Zannos · December 2, 2020, 8:37pm

Thanks very much @dkmayer for these instructions.
One of the students who was able to present with sound via zoom from Windows, said that he was using a similar procedure. I will post the instructions to my classes and test this friday in class if they work out for us, also.

Cheers,
Iannis Zannos

MarcinP · December 2, 2020, 9:18pm

I haven’t tested on Windows, but since zoom audio device only works as an output, what might help is to disable inputs in SC (Server.default.options.numInputBusChannels_(0) I think ). Of course this is only practical if one doesn’t need inputs in SC…
mp

Iannis_Zannos · December 2, 2020, 9:22pm

Great. Making a note of this too.
Will report after testing this in class next Friday.

IZ

Victor_Bombi · December 4, 2020, 10:13am

Has somebody tried with control panel-> sound -> … -> advanced properties: exclusive mode?

Iannis_Zannos · January 14, 2021, 9:11am

Hello,

After repeated tries, several students presented their work on SuperCollider while sharing screen + computer sound on Zoom. They reported different solutions:

Boot the sc synth server after starting scrensharing on zoom.
Boot the sc synth server before logging in and starting a zoom conference, and keep the server running when you enable screen sharing and computer sound sharing.

Solution 2 above is the one used most recently, by 2 persons in sequence.

Hopefully this gives a solution which can be used by others. I’d be interested to know your experiences on the topic.

Iannis Zannos

Iannis_Zannos · January 14, 2021, 5:12pm

Hello,
I have now posted a description of the procedure followed by my student Sophia Emmanoulidou to present her work on supercollider in class live via Zoom.
See my fork here:

github.com

iani/SuperCollider-on-Windows/blob/main/README.md

# How to run SuperCollider with sound during meetings (Skype/Zoom/etc) on Windows 10

- Before starting any meeting you should first open SuperCollider and Boot the Server

- in that way speakers are not engaged solely by the meeting conference and thus you can run Supercollider with sound

- if you have a conference meeting on-going and Boot the Server in SuperCollider afterwards, as a consequence the sound of the conference meeting is lost and engaged merely by SuperCollider */

- All in all, make sure before any meeting to Boot the server in SuperCollider first

Cheers,
Iannis Zannos

jamshark70 · January 15, 2021, 12:21am

This is very good to know, thanks!

hjh

jamshark70 · June 8, 2021, 2:51am

Another option: VoiceMeeter as a bridge.

VoiceMeeter is a free/donation-ware Windows app that mixes mic and app audio into one stream, which can then feed into meeting software’s audio input. I’ve just successfully used this with SC and Tencent Meeting (Chinese app, since I’m in the mainland). I have no reason to believe it wouldn’t work for Zoom.

In VoiceMeeter, set the desired mic input and audio output devices.
In the meeting software, set audio input to be VoiceMeeter’s virtual output device (this is the mixdown, mic + apps).
In SC, set s.options.outDevice to VoiceMeeter’s virtual input – I used MME, maybe other protocols would work too. I set inDevice to the hardware mic input, to avoid any risk of software feedback.
Boot server. At this point, the soundcard driver complained about an unsupported sample rate (?) but after that, it was fine.

I did have to try this a couple times before getting everything right, but this did hold up well for a whole 80-minute lesson.

(Note that this depends on the ability to choose different input and output devices, which seems fully stable in 3.11.2 thanks to some brilliant work by Marcin IIRC. This may not work with earlier versions of SC in Windows.)

hjh