Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Three Techs. I'm here with Bob Fairbairn today. He's joining remote. How's it going, Bob? Pretty good, Tony. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks. Good. And you see, we've got a new setup here with a little remote studio going on, bringing Bob in through FaceTime. Today we're going to be talking about CleanFeed, which we featured on a previous podcast, comparing the audio quality of a phone call to a FaceTime audio call, and then to the HD audio call of CleanFeed.net. Now, if you're not familiar with CleanFeed, you can head on over to CleanFeed.net, check it out. It is a great live HD audio streaming service for podcasters and other broadcasters who might need to interview people remotely, like we're doing today. I wanted to take an opportunity today to show how all of that actually works in the web browser and how to get it set up. So if you want to do this yourself, this is a little walkthrough for you. Right now we're connected through just a regular audio call. It's not through CleanFeed yet, but I wanted to kind of just walk through the webpage here. So I've got Chrome open here. CleanFeed currently only works in Google Chrome, so you need to install that web browser if you don't already have it on your computer. They have two different versions of the service. The one that we're using is the free version, and you can see that they advertise that it's available for producers, podcasters, pretty easy to use as long as you set up your inputs and outputs correctly on your computer. Here they've got a little comparison of the standard version versus the pro version. You can see that both of them offer high quality audio. Both of them offer recording in the web browser. Both of them you can do basically unlimited conferencing with any number of connections. It's very easy to actually get started with CleanFeed. If you click the Get Started button, you just fill in a couple pieces of information like your name, email address, and then choose a login name and a password. I've already done that, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back and just log in to my CleanFeed studio, and I'll have Bob join me in there. So let's log in from my side here. CleanFeed wants to use my microphone, I will allow that, and I'm just going to configure a couple options here before we get the session started. So under the Audio tab, I'm going to click that, and you can see that I have it already optimized for speech. We can also have a low quality talkback option. Maybe you're over a low bandwidth connection and you don't have enough bandwidth to support the HD audio, so you could choose that as an option. The other option here is music optimized. So if you're streaming stereo music, that is the option you want to choose. I'm going to stick with speech because that's what Bob and I are doing today. You can also choose the playback device. Normally, I would just do this through the system settings on your Mac or Windows machine, and it chooses the default playback device. For the source device, again, this is a pro feature if you want to be able to change that in the browser, but you could just as easily change that in your Mac settings. Why don't I go ahead and show how you can do that on a Mac? So if you look in the top right toolbar, I'm going to hold down the Option key on my keyboard and then click on the little volume control icon. From there, you can see that I have my output device set to my RODECaster Pro stereo output. That's what I have here. I also have the input device set to the RODECaster Pro stereo. So I'm using the RODECaster Pro essentially like a USB audio interface. Based on those settings, the Chrome browser and CleanFeed will use those as my input and my output device. Now if you don't have this set up, you can always go into Sound Preferences, which I'll bring up just really quickly here. And under Sound Preferences, you'll see that for Output, again, you can choose the different devices here that you might have connected to your computer. For the input device, again, RODECaster Pro stereo. So there's a couple different ways that you can do it. On Windows, it's similar. You would just go into the Control Panel and change your sources there. Okay. I've got my studio all set up now. I've got my input and output device working here. You can see that there's a little level meter going up and down to show that my audio is coming in nice and strong. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to invite Bob. So all I do is I click Connect. I'll just type in Bob's name. I would then type in his email address and then click Invite. Now Bob already has an email invitation from me. So let me switch over and we have a remote connection to Bob's screen here. So Bob, why don't you go ahead and on your end, we see that Bob has an email there from me and all he's going to do is click that Connect button or he's just going to copy and paste that link into his Chrome browser to open up a connection into my CleanFeed studio. Again, CleanFeed is asking to use his microphone. And now it looks like Bob is in the CleanFeed studio. Okay, Bob, can you hear me?

Speaker 2: Yes, I can once I turn the volume up a little bit here.

Speaker 1: Okay. So Bob is now joining from CleanFeed and you might have noticed a little bit of difference there in terms of the audio quality over the call that we had open. Bob, how's it sounding to you?

Speaker 2: A whole lot better than what we had a little bit ago, that's for sure. Right. The audio quality is pretty good.

Speaker 1: And show me what options you have on your side, Bob. I'm a bit curious in terms of as a participant, what sort of options do you get?

Speaker 2: Okay, so you open and close it with the gear icon and you can click on stereo, but since you have that controlled, I don't have any control over that.

Speaker 1: I think that's also only available in the pro version, right? If you go back in there, you see that those other options had pro next to them. So I think that's one of the features that you get if you pay for the pro subscription is the ability to change those options.

Speaker 2: Right. And then on my end, I have browser settings, internal microphone, the Shure Digital, which is my USB interface for the microphone, and Loopback, which is a piece of software which we won't use, that does some audio routing for me if I needed it.

Speaker 1: Okay. And can you mute yourself by clicking that green microphone icon? Okay, we don't hear you anymore. So that is the mute button.

Speaker 2: Ah.

Speaker 1: All right, and let me take a little bit of a tour on the interface on my side. So again, I have that same green microphone button that if I click, hopefully right now you can't hear me anymore, Bob, right? You're all gone. Okay. I'm going to turn myself back on there. Hi. Hi. If I click on that gear icon, I also have that stereo dropdown option. And again, you can see that these options are only available in the pro version. I also get a dropdown for the audio input device, and I currently have it set to just use the browser setting, which is using the default system setting that I showed you earlier through the sound preferences. So it's using the default microphone setup for the system. Now I see Bob connected here, and if I click on Bob's gear icon, I can see that I can also change, click that stereo dropdown option, and I see those same options that are grayed out for pro version only. I can't change his audio input. That's something that only he can do from his side. I can also click this little icon here, which gives me a little bit more technical detail as far as the connection information, what addresses are being used, and so forth. And if I click this green phone button, what that does is it mutes Bob. So as the host of this studio, I can go in and mute individual participants. So I only have one connection with Bob right now, so that's why we only see Bob on my side. But if additional people would be in this call right now, I would have the ability to mute each one of those individuals separately. Now Bob on his side, if we go back to his view, Bob will only be able to see me when he's connected. He won't be able to see any of the other participants, even if they join, because right now there's none in our little studio session here. But even if other people were to join my studio, he would only be able to see me as the host.

Speaker 2: That's a little bit of privacy there.

Speaker 1: It is. Let's see if we could show some of the other features, like the record option. All right, so up in the top left corner, I have a record button. Now Bob doesn't have this on his view, because he's just a participant. But I can name this recording. We'll call it the T3 Clean Feed Walkthrough. I can also add the day and time to the file name. I can also choose the recording options. So I can choose to record our audio only, other parties. Everyone is, everybody in the call, including me and remote participants. We can do these at separate tracks, and we can also do a multitrack file, which is currently in beta. So I think what I'm going to do, yeah, I'm going to choose separate tracks. So this will put everybody on a separate track. And this is great if you want to go and do multitrack editing after the fact. So let's say, for example, there was some background noise on Bob's end while I was talking. I could go back in post-production, and I could lower his volume or mute his track while that noise was happening, so that it doesn't distract while I'm talking. So let's go ahead and click record there. Now you can see that it is recording here in the browser inside Chrome. At any time, I could click this download button here on the right-hand side. And what that would do is download all of the WAV file recordings. And you can do this, it looks like, even while you're recording. So I'm going to do that right now. So I just click that button, and now I've got a download of those files here. So let's go ahead and let me see if I can open that file and see what that looks like. Okay, so I've got this file here. It's a waveform audio file. Let's look at the information on it. And we can see that it's a stereo file, 24 seconds long, 16 bits per sample, and 48 kilohertz sampling rate. So let me try to play it back on this side and see what we get. And click record there. Now you can see that it is recording here in the browser inside Chrome. At any time, I could click this download button here. Okay, so it looks like we got a pretty good recording there, at least of my voice. Bob wasn't talking at the moment.

Speaker 2: That's unusual.

Speaker 1: But you can see how easy it is to just get going with podcasting or whatever sort of remote calling you want to do with CleanFeed. It's pretty simple to set up. As long as you have your microphone and a pair of headphones connected that you're listening to so you don't get feedback, it works pretty easily and smoothly. You also don't need separate audio recording software on your Mac or Windows computer. You could just use the recording feature in the browser in CleanFeed and download those WAV files.

Speaker 2: Yeah, there might be a little confusion because you're using the RODECaster Pro as our recording device currently because you have these inputs coming from other places that you're trying to gather data for the podcast. So that's a little more complicated on your end right now.

Speaker 1: That is a little bit more complicated, and we will do an overview of the RODECaster in a separate episode. That is a very cool device with a lot of great features, and it allows us to do these things where we have a phone call here, maybe somebody else coming in on a different phone, and also somebody coming in through FaceTime audio. Being able to bring all those audio sources together very easily using a single device and also record internally on the RODECaster Pro itself. So very cool device. I needed that today because we were doing all that setup beforehand before we were connected through CleanFeed. So it came in really useful for this show today.

Speaker 2: It's a really powerful tool.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well hopefully you got a great little overview there of CleanFeed.net. Go online and check it out. Sign up for a free account. They also have a paid account. The free account is, as far as I can tell, there's no time limit on it. There's no connection limit. Use it as much as we are here, and see what you think of it. Let us know what you thought about this episode. Leave us a comment. Ask us any questions that you have or any ideas for new episodes on other topics that you'd like to see, and we will see you next time on the 3 Techs.