How do I get sound from my computer to the Connect Meeting audience?

Posted on by ianjustingetconnect

On occasion you will need to have the audience in your meeting hear the sound that is actually coming through your computer speakers.  This used to be an issue with videos form YouTube for example, where you play the video on your computer using a ‘Screen-Share’ and then you would like the audio to be broadcast to the participants as well

The sound from a movie on your desktop is not going through Connect, it is going through your speakers…you need to route your speakers to the Microphone on your system and then it will play through VoIP

Some sound cards can do this internally, but the very simplest option is to use a cable to connect the output from your speakers (computer) to the mic input…essentially looping them together.

 

Here is an example of the cable and a picture of the cable I use in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1

You can then use the VoIP to broadcast your audio from your speakers to the audience by selecting the Mic in the computer, which is now effectively connected to your speakers


Virtual Audio Cables

If you want a software solution for this, I have had success using a couple of tools that are essentially ‘Virtual Audio Cables’.  This allows you to set the output of your computer to the virtual cable and then the input to Connect in the same manner

I will try to pull together a detailed tutorial on using these sometime in the future

Please be sure to test these options with a trial before purchasing, success can vary I am sure depending on your OS, CPU and sound card

On a PC I have used ‘Virtual Audio Cable’, you can download a free trial from the following link (the trial has a soundbite every few seconds, but it allows you to test the functionality), the full version is ~$35:
http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm

On a Mac I have used Soundflower to do this, but again you need to work this out for yourself, it was quite a while back.  Soundflower will appear in the ‘Sound’ options form the Preferences pane and it is a free extension for the Mac:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/14067/soundflower

Note – Be aware that there is a danger of the video and the audio being out of sync if you are using this in the use-case to have an flv playing in your Share-Pod and then you use this cable to rebroadcast the audio into an integrated phone conference (Universal Voice).  You might do this is you are concerned that your participants do not have speakers and you want them to be able to hear the audio from the flv in their phone conference.  In this case the audio from your flv would be sent also to the VoIP feed and then rebroadcast to the phone users.  Be aware that you really need to ensure that participants use either VoIP *or* the phone to listen to the audio, otherwise they will get two feeds