Specifically, I have weekly lessons on my instrument, and it was just a horrible, garbled experience attempting to play instruments to each other.
(Of course, these are theoretical considerations, not a prediction for what actually happens in practice.)
64 kpbs, whichever codec, gets this small by cutting all frequencies outside of human speech. It cannot record instrumental sounds well.
Unfortunately, you're completely wrong about this. Sorry to undeceive you, I would have said the same a few years ago. Codecs, especially the best AAC encoders, and Opus, have improved drastically since 2005.
Listen for yourself to 64 kbps music samples made with the 2011 Opus. They're quite passable. https://people.xiph.org/~greg/opus/ha2011/ Certainly good enough for a WebRTC stream. No, it's not close to transparent, but it's going to be fine for a music lesson, there's no weird pitch shifts or anything.
To be clear, I mean quality indistinguishable from an audio CD, listening to songs in the quiet living room. I am not talking good enough for a stream or a phone call, that's a much lower bar.
For historic reference. Steam changed the codec for their voice chat around 2011 to something called SILK that seemed to be the parent of OPUS. It gave just enough quality to blast Ievan Polkka and Britney Spears in team fortress games and other players could recognize the song (noting it's very very low bitrate, it ain't great). By comparison, the previous encoding couldn't play songs at all, it butchered most frequencies so much that the audio was just lost.
That's right - SILK was a codec tuned for voice chat, not music. CELT is the other parent of OPUS and is tuned for music. (Opus uses a hybrid strategy that switches between codecs as necessary.) Don't just look at the benchmarks, at the bottom of the page you can click on the links and listen to a bunch of 64 kbps Opus samples. They're very, very good.
And no, they aren't indistinguishable from a CD. As I said in the original comment, they're more than good enough for high quality music streaming for a video chat.
> I'd really love to find out that codecs have halved audio size in the past half decade.
This has happened, to my ears at least. A little over a decade ago, I could not-infrequently tell a V2 MP3 (~196 kbps) from the FLAC. Took 256 kbps (~V0) to be reliably transparent. (I think it's improved marginally since then, V2 might be transparent almost all the time now.) These days, it's quite infrequent I can tell a 128 kbps Opus file from the FLAC. And the best codecs are quite passable even at 64 kbps.
Actually, Opus is "okay" even down to like 48 kbps. Try the sample here: https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opus-1.2/
Those features are usually configurable in major video conferencing apps.
FYI, I saw some artist play on Zoom not so long ago, and the music was muted by their client. And they didn't know it happened or how to fix it. No software is immune from misconfiguration.
Meanwhile, Zoom works pretty seamlessly for me, always.
You also do need gmail, an app, and to have it enabled.
Zoom is in a class of its own in terms of actual call quality and UX, it’s a lot better.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/22/21231294/google-meet-gall...
> You also do need gmail, an app, and to have it enabled.
What do you mean? Calls are had at meet.google.com, nothing to do with gmail?
This only applies to Google Meet, not Google Hangouts (the non-enterprise version)
Either way it’ll be nice if they do that.
Other comment was a reply to the parent comment, I was stating that you still need gmail for hangouts and to have it turned on in your email settings, or you need the specific app.
I know less about meet - I think that’s some corporate google product I don’t have access to? Google’s strategy around messaging is impossible to understand so it’s possible I’m wrong about that.
I am unsure what OBS is but it sounds like you're recording your screen via webcam and then streaming that ... My guess is the compression on talking heads is aggressive and has a different profile to a screenshare.
And even with the talking heads compression: why can't I disable it (I and most colleagues have solid broadband)? We have a nice FHD (Sony A6400 to HDMI-capture) webcam as well and the picture there is also far from superb.
But well, this all might make sense if the target is just to make sure, we don't increase their AMZ-bill too much after our uni had setup their license-agreement with them...
We were really trying to use different solutions, because of all of the problems Zoom has. We just had constant quality issues that made it really hard to hear people.
Then we tried Zoom one day and it was incredible how good it was in comparison.