My wife is music director of a small church that uses Zoom. Every Sunday Zoom malfunctions, including stranding some in the waiting room and, most annoyingly, making them unable to un-mute. If you’ve used Zoom you know what I mean.

She uses computer sound for the recordings of the virtual chamber orchestra I direct; that works well. Then she has a ‘Zoom choir’ that does songs one line per person. Finally she uses Acapella to prepare the choir anthem.

But Zoom has ruined parts of almost every service!

What might be better? GoToMeeting? Skype? Google Meet (new)?

Ideas most welcome. This is getting undignified. Thanks.

Haven't tried Google Meet yet, but it will likely bloom fast given the horsepower
I've been relying on Teams lately, which also has a lot of horsepower behind it <grin>

Thanks, Bob. Teams - is that Microsoft?

I've been looking at reviews for Streamyard for our Church services.

That's new to me. Thanks!

This forum is so great.

Just don’t use it. Particularly for a church service. We tried live streaming at our church for two weeks then decided we might as well use pre recorded videos where we had control of quality. Online congregants appreciated the lack of streaming bugs. We also stripped down the worship team.

One has to ask what tangible value there is to attempt such a complex thing live With dependencies on bandwidth one ha no control over without a dedicated tech staff and streaming server. Upload to YouTube instead.

Yes, Teams is Microsoft Teams.

They have a subscription service (pay by the month) but I also think they have a free version.

We use it (as well as Zoom and Skype) and have not experienced any issues.

Hope this helps.

Matt,

I was teaching classes of Years 11 and 12 for 5 weeks using MS Teams when we were in lockdown. I didn't have a problem with it. It allowed good two-way communication between me and my students.

Teams also allwed me to record the sessions so that people could watch the video again if they missed out on anything.

Regards,
Noel

We record our services. Only had 1 opps.

...Deb

We have decided that having interaction is important, and do not wish to prerecord the service. If it helps, we have between 40 - 60 average attendees. Half oF them are either physically unable to go to the church, or currently in other places including three continents. So, we intend to continue using some interactive platform even after we can return to the physical church.

Try MS Teams

Hopefully it will deliver better results.

Of course you know and I know that there are many separate influencing factors: bandwidth, system load, resource availability, network speed, and more, so we can't necessarily find a common denominator to blame when the results are less than successful.

(Actually, how advanced we all are. Alan Turin could only have dreamed...and he lived within the lifetime of many of us)

we use zoom for our church services but music has been poor quality - maybe our choir master wasn't uploading it right - i think we was micing up a keyboard.

Bob, that’s right: live keyboard sound using a microphone is dreadful in Zoom. Something to do with their algorithm being tuned to favor spoken words, I’ve read.

But there are some things you can do. First, go to Settings, Audio, Advanced and disable the first two options.

Second, this is one area where we do prerecord the sound. You make an audio file, bring up a Shared Screen, and check the checkbox about using computer sound (something like that; it should be in the lower left of the share screen page). Then load your audio in iTunes or whatever player. It should sound great going out over Zoom.

thanks matt - worth a try although i think we'll probably need the congregation to mute their mics as shared responses are very ragged when everyone chooses their own timing. during a live service at least some common ground is established! singing will probably be worse.

Singing is indeed worse. We mute all but a few choir members and the pastor for the hymns. The 'live' hymns are then sung one line at a time by one person at a time. That works.

If you try the shared screen/computer audio, you will find that the quality is good enough even if people have their mics on (though we turn them off to avoid horrible latency). Try it.

Hi Matt
So, if I understand correctly, the backing is pre-recorded and then each person take turns in singing the line? And there is no latency between the backing and the singing?

Hi Joanne. Yes, a prerecorded piano or organ. Yes, each person sings one phrase as planned. No, there is some latency but it’s acceptable. Or another way to say it is that this is the only way we can sing live that is acceptable.

I've had good experiences as a user, I was not the organizer, with GoToMeeting and Cisco Webex.

The Cisco Webex probably has an advantage over Skype and Zoom and similar systems. It is not as widespread in private homes and so there are not as many users at the same time in the same area online...

GoToMeeting also targets mostly the professional market.

Thank you. I need to check both out.

FYI only... Most businesses here in the U.S. were using Webex before the whole COVID thing. Then Zoom kind of swooped in and bumped off Webex in a lot of places. The company I work for still uses both but leans toward Zoom.

Who is the ‘audience’, who is the ‘prompter’, and who is the ‘performer’ at your church?

For these times of isolation and then when you are able to meet together again, answering this question will have a profound effect on the posture your church takes as well as the approach to the use of music in any church situation.

Many mistakenly believe the ‘audience’ are the people gathered together. This is the source of most church music problems and frankly the source of most problems in churches to begin with. It fosters a consumer mindset in the church. The audience is God.

Almost always hand in hand with the above mistake is the answer of the question about who the performers are. The same mistake of thinking the congregants are the audience puts the singers and keyboardists and band as the performers. Wrong posture again. The performers are the collected congregants offering a simultaneous act of worship to God; their audience. This is really not a possibility in isolation. That is without serious dedicated spend on technology. None of the conferencing tools allow for this real time, usable quality, time aligned participation. Even Jamkazam, a platform dedicated to music doesn’t allow for it.

This is the most devastating thing about isolation and quarantine for Music use in churches that have learned these roles of God as the audience, congregants as the performers, and musicians and singers as the prompters.

So I will pose the question: what is the basic point of the desire to put a whole bunch of work into this? Be wary of any answer that involves the word ‘talent’.

MS Teams isn't free. That seems to be the major consideration around here. Dig up a couple of coffee cans and spend money if you want quality.

Zoom has had ZERO issues here and I do Zoom chats with people almost daily. And all the hooey about "security" was exactly that. Nobody used Zoom to get at your bank account. People were guessing passwords with random password generators and crashing meetings. As soon as some clickbait article says SECURITY people stop at that word and start spreading the 1/8th truth about the product in question. Add that to you all with your refusal to ever update anything, and there you go. So annoying when people who have a thimble full of computer knowledge that they read on the internet speak as experts.... wow.

Thanks for your comments but I think this thread should end now.

My wife and I are not members of this church. We are hired to do what the church wants to do, and provide music (and in my case, technology advice).

I have received many good suggestions here and have come to the conclusion we will continue using Zoom for now.

Thank you.

I'll just leave this here ..
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/free

Free NOW, but will it stay free forever Harv? Do you think that once it gets extremely popular they will start charging? That seems to be how Micro$oft does things.

Zoom works fine, and all those horror stories of security problems were presumably overly dramatic. Possibly even started by Micro$oft. I am on Zoom daily, sometimes more than once a day and I have never had anybody hack one of my meetings and blow up my office as the rumors said. "They" were allegedly getting into computers and stealing back accounts, deleting files..... I wouldn't believe anything Micro$oft says even if they say "There are 24 hours in a day".

But ya know what? Whatever.....

Our company, Raytheon Technologies - who has a VERY strict IT overall policy just replaced WebEx with Zoom.

Zoom has worked better the past two weeks. There is a website that tells you which online services are having problems, and Zoom used to have significant problems on Sunday mornings. It’s been better recently.

The site is https://downdetector.com/

We never had any security concerns.

Thanks. Security was never the issue. And I think I may have more than a thimble-full of knowledge.

Haha, you're new here so we can let that go but you need to be around these forums long enough to know who you're talking to. Matt is a retired computer science professor but I know what you're saying because I've said it many times too but then I mostly know who everybody is. This particular thread is filled with computer and IT pros but overall, the PGM forums have a fair amount of people who have little clue about this stuff and need help with the most basic things.

We try to be gentle about it because they're interested in making music and to a person who is both a music software nooby AND a computer nooby it can be challenging for them. I know this well because that was me 20 years ago. I knew squat about either one too.

This is a very friendly and knowledgeable group of music fanatics who can help you if you're having issues with Biab, RB, other DAW's, plugins, recording techniques, all that stuff.

Bob

And welcome to the forum, Flemiis. I see you're from NYC.

Bob is right, this is a very helpful forum with little fluff, discord, or pretense. Why, I probably disagree with Bob as much as anyone but he's a great guy.

I realized when re-reading the thread that I did not add one technique we use to minimize this problem. For readings with responses, the pastor writes a series of very short lines, and people are instructed to pause after reading each line. What this accomplishes is to limit the effect of the latency. After a little practice, people learn to find the correct timing.