How to have perfect sound when playing music during a Zoom meeting

Hey friends, in this video I'm going to show you how to get perfect audio when you're trying to play music during your Zoom presentations, webinars, what have you. Now this is specific for Zoom, so if you're using a different software, you might have to make very similar adjustments. But I'm going to show you in Zoom how to do this. So first of all, you're going to open your Zoom meeting and you're going to click on right here, this green button that says Share Screen. Now this is going to allow you to set the correct features. But before you do that, what I want you to do is I want you to pay attention to this microphone on the bottom left. Now this microphone here has a little upward arrow that opens up a sub menu and you'll be able to now choose the microphone. So in this case, this is the Shure MV7, which is the microphone that many of you have received from us as part of your program. Your, you're going to select that as your microphone. So this is going to be where the audio input is going in. The next thing you're going to do is select a speaker. And if I were to choose my computer as the speaker, such as my built in output internal speakers, as it says here, then the sound is going to be coming from my computer. Now the problem with that when you're playing music is that it's going to play the music through your speakers and your microphone is going to pick it up and then your computer can get a little bit confused depending on how loud your music is, depending on how loud your voice is, so on and so forth. So we don't want that, we don't want that interference taking place. And that's why sometimes your sound might be a little bit off or sound garbled. So we want the speaker to be the Shure MV7 or whatever microphone you're using. You could also use headphones for this. So if I were to plug in my headphones, then that would be my microphone and my speaker so that I'm hearing the sound coming in through my my buds. And then the microphone is my speaker itself. We want to try to avoid when we're playing music to have the sound coming from our actual computer itself, because again, it's going to create that interference. So that's one of the first things you're going to do is make sure you've got the right settings there and then just to have a safe backup, because this is going, these settings are going to be specific within Zoom. Okay, now if you're playing something from an alternative software, like in this case, if I'm going to be playing something from YouTube, then YouTube isn't going to use my Zoom settings to determine what speaker to play from. It's going to use my global settings on my computer. So what I'm going to do, and this is specific for Mac, so you might have a similar setting for a PC. And we're going to click on System Preferences, which is this gray gearbox, and then we're going to choose sound, which is towards the middle bottom here. And you can see that right now my default input device is the internal microphone. I'm going to change that to the Shure MV7. And my output device, as you can see, is internal speakers. So if I were not to change this, then what would happen is the sound would be playing. When I play my YouTube video, the sound would be playing through my shure, through my internal speakers, and then that would create the interference. So we want to change that in the global settings as well. So we're going to just kind of create that global change. And then I'm going to X this out here. And now if I were to play this track, let's say I'm going to go play it right now, then it's going to play through. You're not going to hear anything now because it's playing through my earbuds, but it's. I don't hear anything coming from my speakers. Okay? Now, if I were not to make that change and I were to go back here and go to sound, and the output was my internal speakers. Now are you going to hear that sound coming through the speakers? And that could actually. I don't know what it sounds like for you, but that could be creating interference. And certainly it's not going to create the crisp audio that I want. We want the audio playing from the internal system, not from the speakers into the microphone and back into the system. That's not going to be the quality and level of sound that we want. All right, so now that we've done that, we're going to go back here. And so our settings are correct, our audio settings, our input and output are correct. And now I'm going to click on Share Screen. We've got a few cool features in Zoom that many of you may not know about, and each of these may require a separate video, but we're going to go to Advanced. And under Advanced you're going to see you have a few options. You can share slides as a background. I don't recommend doing that, you can share a portion of your screen. So if I wanted to share, you know, just my slides, then I could do that. Or a specific part of my screen, I could do that. If I want to share my computer audio only, then I could do that if I want to share a video. This is a cool feature. So if you've got a video that you've put together and you want it to play kind of seamlessly, which is what we did with our encore replay of our event, I just pressed Play and the video played directly from my computer sound video. Everything was perfect and I didn't have to sit there and manage it. And even as I'm using the controller button features, you can't see it. So this is an internal Zoom video play feature, which is much better than opening up QuickTime or a video player and then pressing Play, because when you do that, you can see all the other things that you probably don't want your user to see. So we're going to click on computer Audio. Or let's say you want to have a portion of your screen open while you're doing this. What you want to make sure you do is pay attention to the bottom left here. So if you're sharing a portion of your screen, it's going to give you the option down here to share sound. Okay. And we might want to change this to high fidelity, just so you get the best quality sound possible, so people can hear you. And. And if you're not sharing a portion of your screen, you're just going to share audio, and maybe you're going to be talking to the camera, then that feature doesn't exist. It's already set up for you. But you might want to just click on this and make sure this little down arrow and click on stereo high fidelity, so you're getting the best quality sound possible. And now what's going to happen is you're going to hit share. And so any sounds that are coming that are being played on my computer are now going to be audible to whoever is listening in on Zoom. Now, one thing you have to make sure you do is that you close all of these accessory apps that can potentially ding. So you might want to go in here and close your messages. Okay. So you just kind of double click or right click and hit quit. Telegram. I want to hit quit. WhatsApp. I want to hit quit. Because if somebody pings me, even though I may have turned off the notifications, sometimes sound comes through. Right. And let's say you've got Facebook Open. There's a little hack that you can have here where you right click on the tab and you can actually mute this particular tab. So let's say you want to keep Facebook open because you're streaming to Facebook Live or, or whatnot. Then you want to hit right click on the tab and then hit Mute Site. So any sounds that come up are not going to interfere with your presentation itself. Or better yet, if you don't need Facebook, you can go ahead and close it. I try to close any unnecessary Zoom tabs that I might have open or, sorry, Chrome tabs that I might have open in the event that somebody pings me or dings me and it disrupts my recording. So just food for thought for you, try to keep as many apps closed as you possibly can. Takes up, you know, memory in your ram. It slows your computer down, potentially. It opens you up to vulnerability if an app crashes or something like that. And it also takes up, you know, a potential for your focus and attention. Right. It could distract you. So try to shut down anything that's unnecessary so that your computer and you can be fully focused on the task at hand. So once we're done sharing our recording, you'll see up here, here's my little tab up here. And I can just hit Stop Share, and it'll stop sharing the audio that's coming through. So there you have it. A few simple settings that you can make to get the best audio possible. One of the reasons that if you're newer to our mentorship or VGPA program, we give you a professional quality micro like the one I'm using right now, is because we want you to sound amazing. And it's hard to sound amazing when your audio settings aren't set up correctly. So I hope this helps. And here's to making musical and audio magic in all of your Zoom presentations and recordings that you do. Lots of love, and if you found this helpful, let me know and I'll be recording more videos like this so that you can feel confident when you're presenting. Now, before I jump off, I want to share that a really good tip for you to make sure you've got your audio settings dialed in is you're going to want to make sure you have somebody doing a test run with you. So let's say I'm playing this video. I want to make sure that I can adjust the sound so that it's not too loud on the receiver's end, it's not drowning me out, and that my microphone is correctly positioned. You know, podcast mic, generally, you want them within a few inches of your mouth. If they're too far away, it's going to sound a little bit tinny and you're going to be yelling at the mic and people are going to pick up on that, and it's not going to be your natural voice. So adjust the gain on the microphone and also adjust the volume in the videos that you have going on as well. And the best way to know what volume is correct is to have somebody give you feedback. So maybe have your child or, you know, husband or spouse or wife, whatever the case may be a friend, have them tune in so that you can make the appropriate audio adjustments because, you know, nothing sounds less professional than, can you hear me? Is my sound okay? Is my volume okay? And then you're trying to, you know, make micro adjustments instead of being focused on delivering your presentation. So again, hope that helps. And again, here's to awesome sound quality in all your videos. Talk to you soon. Bye for now.