(okay, this is kind of an abandoned post because so much of the information’s changed, so I’m just going to throw this up here for right now… to be revised?)
You Can’t Stop the Signal
(But it can get pretty bad so let’s work on that)
So – I’ve been doing a LOT of Live streaming for various purposes and because I’m (relatively) high-profile I then get a lot of questions about my signal chain and preferences on streaming services and stuff and also things. I don’t know that my opinion is particularly more educated than anyone else’s – but it is TOTALLY informed by almost a decade of trial and error and that’s gotta be worth something!
For at least 10 years, Livecasting my open mics and ilyAIMY’s shows has been something I’ve TRIED to do. Whether in the coffeehouses as a way to raise the signal on the open mics that I run (showing off the amazing talent that rolls through) or to let fans back home watch our shows on the road (I remember fishing a webcam over a balcony at the Columbus Bar in Columbus, IN – or the infamous incident of the Stagger Inn’s Zebra Girl grinding on me during the very first webcast that my then-girlfriend Kristen Jones ever tuned into) – it’s always been SECONDARY to running a Live show. I’ve had people tune in and be happy, or tune out because the sound or video was subpar. I’ve worked on it over the years, but it hasn’t been till Covid-19’s lockdown of our world that Live streaming a show has been elevated to paramount importance.
Fortunately, I’d been working on it.
In any case – I’m going to try to track what I’m doing here, and some of what I’ve done. As with everyone else – now that 100% of our shows are going to be virtual for a while – development on this will be evolving swiftly. I expect half of this to be out-of-date by the time I play my next bar gig.
Live Streaming 101.
First off, we hold these truths to be self-evident!
1) Bandwidth Matters
Across the (ahem, please forgive me) “spectrum” this probably matters more than anything else. It can make a bad rig sound passable or the fanciest rig sound like crap. A good internet connection means better video and audio, a bad internet connection will cause breaks, digital distortion, weird compression artifacts and eventual just out-and-out signal loss. Bad bandwidth generally sounds a little more metallic and you start losing highs and lows. It’s a slightly different sound from audio compression but it’s effectively the same idea – data compression is trying to decide what information’s most important to keep and unfortunately it’s aesthetic isn’t always the same as that of our human sensorium. I shouldn’t REALLY put numbers on it because I haven’t tested thoroughly, but my experience has shown that this starts to get noticeable at UPLOAD speeds of around 20mbps or lower, and starts getting really rough around 5… perhaps truly unlistenable at around 2.
There are plenty of ways to maximize your speeds… not all of these things are always options though…
- Kill anything else using bandwidth (the applications, not the people) – including the kid upstairs watching a movie on their phone, google backing your photos to the cloud, the iPad that you forgot to turn off that’s decided now’s the time to update all it’s apps… (don’t forget to check the device you’re actually ON too!)
- reduce video quality – or turn it off all together! Most of these applications figure you’re “only” talking so the audio’s not as important as keeping the face-to-face video synched and downgrades the audio accordingly – but the video’s the real data hog. For most of our purposes we want the SOUND to be good though. The video’s icing. Delicious, beautiful, icing… but it ain’t the meat of the cake.
Ahem. Meat cake.
- on a computer – get old school and nab some CAT-5 and wire yourself to your router! If on a mobile device or you’re otherwise too new-fangled to have an ethernet port, wander the house and check your internet speeds… being close to your router’s usually an obvious solution, but good and bad spots can also result from metal in the house, weird little corners and wifi absorbing dogs (maybe?) … wander around and find a good spot and THEN worry about the rest… reducing variables is important though… especially with wifi you can have everything running great one day and then you discover your neighbour’s microwave interferes with the spot you’ve picked and they HAPPEN to really need to reheat their tofu lasagna RIGHT as you go Live!
2) Light Matters
3) Comfort Matters