Wife sounds like Minnie Mouse with Zoom - SOLVED

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

My wife is having problems with Zoom. Sometimes, but not always, on a Zoom session she sounds like Minnie Mouse - high-pitched and squeaky. This is a serious WAF issue, and next week she has a Zoom meeting so that can record "reading to kids", which she used to do in person in schools, pre-pandemic. I need to fix this for her, it needs to be reliable, and I need it fast.

There doesn't seem to be anything about this in Gentoo-land. I've seen some references in Arch-land about about changing the default-sample-rate to 48000, which I haven't tried yet. I'm not fond of pulseaudio in the first place, but I needed to install it to have Zoom working properly, and even thing it isn't 100%, as evidenced by this question.

I'm also wondering about putting in pipewire instead, though from what I've seen it seems to work with pulseaudio instead of completely replacing it, meaning that I have two breakage points. But if it solves this problem, I'm for it. Looking in Gentoo it appears that piepwire doesn't need pulseaudio after all, but without it controlling it becomes problematic. The good side about keeping pulseaudio there in some role is that it keeps pavucontrol, and she strongly prefers GUIs to anything command-line.

Advice, please?
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eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:42 pm Post subject:

I think I've seen this happen in zoom if I have the camera plugged in prior to starting Zoom, and seems to work better if it's attached after. This is of course annoying but it seems to imply initialization failure. I haven't used zoom in a while so I don't know... Was using a old UVC driver camera.
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2022 12:15 am Post subject:

What video capture unit (with built in sound I assume, or are you using separate sound?) are you using? Specific model?
I've heard (heard is a misnomer, other people needed to report to me) that echo cancellation also sometimes is a problem not only the voice tone issue.
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Mar 17, 2022 1:35 am Post subject:

The camera I use that had the pitch problem is a Logitech as well, not sure which model it is, but it's likewise an "eyeball" camera. could be an issue specific to the Logitech, but not sure, hence wondering about the model number. Now that we're out of lockdown I've had little interest in testing it since there hasn't been a need to work with it anymore, despite getting other cameras to point at my 3d printer...

IIRC nobody complained about a pitch problem when using my built-in UVC camera/audio on my laptops... which more strongly points to a hardware quirk with the audio hardware on the Logitech.

---

It appears I have a Logitech C500 ... suspicious ...
Sometimes wish to get back into lockdown so I have reason to test the other cameras, alas no reason to now.
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2022 6:55 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the follow up, good to know that more than just my Logitech has issues. I have yet another Logitech camera and it doesn't even enumerate properly all the time in USB, I ended up pretty much delegating it to the round file, maybe I will need to avoid all Logitech cameras in the future...
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2022 2:33 pm Post subject:

I have another Logitech UVC camera and likewise found that it was flaky but it doesn't detect 100% of the time in Linux so I figure there's more going on with that camera. But the C500 detects properly all of the time, just that 50% of the time I sound like minnie mouse too. Other applications work fine with the C500, audio and video.

I did not see the "approved camera" list from zoom, that is a shame. Yeah appears that zoom is using some crazy feature and closed-source silencing it. so agreed, zoom problem.

One thing that I didn't quite address properly is that on the laptops, the onboard sound is being used unlike the C500's built in microphone. Perhaps there's some quirkiness with just the audio portion of the C500. I also have tested a junky ihome branded camera (appears to have a 320x240 sensor and has awful optics) and its audio appears to always work unlike the C500.
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petr2008 · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2022 1:35 pm Post subject:

I experienced similar problem with Teams yesterday. My voice was somehow silenced after the first word. Even with microphone sensitivity on maximum. I tested it with external microphone and I was told it behaves the same. It seems to me that something is now wrong with surround noise suppression.