Need tips for using your Amazon Alexa? Join Lucy on all about Lady A on the second Thursday of the month for simple tricks to get the most out of your a lady device, listen on the Unmute presents podcast feed. See you there. Oh yeah, did I mention you can also check out unmute show for all past episodes and to get more information about what we've got going on.
Hi everyone, I'm titling this contribution bugbyte. I know it's kind of corny. Digitalbytes Bugbyte. Anyway, I wanted to show you a little bit of a process that I went through to report a bug for an app that I use regularly. So this is the Dropbox app and I have experienced recent issues with focus of voiceover jumping when I didn't want it to. So I wanted to figure out how to get in touch with the developers at Dropbox. But I also first had to figure out whether this was actually an iOS 18 issue or an Apple issue. So what I did was I decided to go to another app that has a long list of things that I have to navigate through to see if voiceover focus jumps there as well. So the best candidate for that was email. So I went to the Apple Mail app and I scrolled through my inbox, which has probably 100 or so emails in it. I know I saved them around for far too long. So I was scrolling up with three fingers and swiping right, swiping left, and focus did not jump to the beginning of my inbox as it does to the beginning of my Dropbox folder. So rather than contact Apple, who is just going to pass the book to tell me that it's Dropbox's issue, which I think it is, I then needed to figure out how to get in touch with Dropbox. So I went to the App store listing. So you don't want to actually go to the app itself, but the app store listing for Dropbox. And I started reading the preliminary information at the top and what the app does and so forth, and then it says, you know, if you want to report an issue or make things better, be sure and get in touch with us in the community forums. But there was no address for the community forums or no website. So I thought, well, that's crazy. So I scrolled down through the reviews and read about a person who was having an issue with the Dropbox app. And then of course the developer response was right after that and it said, you know, of course, uninstall and reinstall the app, the stock answer, and if you still have problems go to. And here is the website. It is dropboxforum.com forum being singular and so I thought, well that's great. So why not just put that at the top where you suggested that I go there in the first place? So I decided that I would then go to the forums and I put in my username, which is the first part of my email address, not the athing.com, but it's just the first part of your email address. And then I wrote my post. Now I made sure to include these important things, the version of my phone, the iOS version I'm running, and I did mention it was the most recent version of the Dropbox app as of this date. And I also mentioned that I was a person who happens to be blind using voiceover and I titled the posting accessibility issue. I also discussed how the usability was being affected and I was going to feel grateful for them to address the issue. And I also needed to categorize the posts. So I did choose APIs and support something along that line. And also I was pleased to know that the box was checked so that when a response is given I will receive an email, which is great. And when I checked my email, I got a congratulatory message for being a conversation starter. I also earned a new member badge, so gamifying things is apparently helpful. And now I wait. So I will find out if this issue continues. And as I say, what's happening for me is that when I'm in a long list in say, my public folder, I can scroll up with three fingers to get to a certain page and then I start flicking right or left to find the exact file I want and focus jumps back up to the top. So if you are experiencing that issue and you want to report a bug bite, feel free to go to dropboxforum.com if it has to do with Dropbox. Otherwise, if you determine that the issue is specific to that app, get in touch with the developer. I find most developers are really responsive, especially the small ones that really have the time to address these things. I will be sure and check back in and let you know if Dropbox killed off the bug.
So if you didn't know Marty and Chris send me their audio for digital bytes. Then I turn around and put it together in a template using reaper. Curious about templates and how to edit with Reaper? Check out club unmute so you can download the four part series that I did on editing with Reaper. Go to unmute show and choose join the club to get more information or gift it to someone who you want to edit your audio. Today I returned home from the American Council of the Blind of Oregon's annual convention. And of course, me being me and not saying no, I am the person who gets to do the audio for the hybrid convention that we held for the last couple of years. I've thrown together some interesting setups that, frankly, haven't sounded the best. Last year was the closest that I was looking for. But the problem was last year is I used a hotel provided mixer, and honestly, they had all the EQ set, so there was no low end. So it almost sounded like the entire convention was on a phone. Can someone say 1995? But that told me once I had my own equipment, I could make this actually work. And I have a handy little thing to my left that I've reset up so I can record this audio for you and demonstrate a couple of things while talking you through it. First of all, I want to thank ACB media because they have for me, well, I guess for other people on the media team, a outline of this specific mixer's buttons so you can know what to press and what ties to everything that goes with it. Before we continue, I want to play two clips. They're both about 30 seconds long. One is going to be the intro of our annual board meeting from 2023, and then the other one will be an intro from our annual board meeting of 2024. They were both chaired by the same person. Person and interestingly enough, held in the same exact room. But here's what the difference in quality sounds like. I have a real quick report. The southwestern chapter has been meeting on the second Saturday of the month. We will not be. We did meet this this month. That was a we did meet this month. And we have gotten together at a local restaurant where most of the members enjoy the food. And it's been pretty good. We moved our meeting times from 01:00 p.m. to 12:30 p.m. because we have to be out of the restaurant at a certain time. Sure. I can give a fairly quick district report and also an announcement while participating this weekend. Please make sure you talk on the microphone so everyone can hear you. So, southwestern chapter, those who don't know, I serve as the president, and we have our elections coming up in November. Cassie has been working great at coming together with creating a membership engagement program calendar. So she's been sending that out to our members. The mixer that I'm talking about is the Mackie ProfX twelve V three. And there is some differences in the v two and v three. Others can tell you those differences. I know channel 1112 on the v two is RCA input, whereas on the v three it's quarter inch. But I believe there's some other differences as well that might impact what you'll be doing with the device. When we got to the hotel on Friday, I was planning to use my Gemini microphones, which are wireless microphones that transmit to a receiver. And that receiver has a quarter inch out for the combined inputs or two XLR outs for you to send each independent input to its own channel. Well, they had some different setups than what we had last year and had their audio going into a mixer there, and then their audio going out of that mixer into some Bose speakers that were aligned throughout the room. The problem we had is their mixer only had one output. And the reason I bought this particular mixer is because it had multiple outputs. So we'll talk about the way I used it, and it looks like there's some additional flexibility when you use control room and some other aspects of this mixer. However, the points that I used was the submix or submix one and the main mix or main mix. Let me describe this mixer to you. On the top face of it, you have eight knobs that affect different parts of the EQ compression and effects. And you also have a panning knob and a gain knob. Below those eight knobs you have a round mute button, and below that round mute button you have a slider for that specific channel. To the right of that slider you have three buttons going from top to bottom. You have submix one, main mix and PFL or pre fade. Listen when the PFL button is pressed on any channel. Note that all of your audio, at least to the headphones, gets muted unless a PFL is pressed on that specific channel. So the problem we had to solve was we wanted people in person to be able to use wireless microphones and be heard in person. We also wanted those people in person to be heard on Zoom. And we wanted Zoom to come in, be heard on person, but not hear themselves because it's a little awkward to hear yourself after brief delay. So with the shure microphones that the hotel had, there were three different receivers with XLR outs on those receivers. Those XLRs I plugged into channels one, two and three on the mixer. I pressed the buttons on the right of those channels for the submix and the main mix. So those three channels had two buttons pressed on the right. The fourth channel had the vocaster audio coming out of it. Into channel four. And on this one, I simply pressed the main mix button. I'll explain the difference here in a minute. The rest of the channels weren't necessarily being used in this problem solving scenario. I set the sliders to be even, or is close to even, with each of the other sliders on the mixer. And I plugged in a cable to the submix output on the right hand side of the front face of the mixer. The other end of this quarter inch to XLR cable got plugged into host mic on the vocaster. This way, when I go into zoom, I'm able to pick the host mic, which, interestingly enough, is a virtual mic. We can talk about that in a moment, actually. And then I plugged in a quarter inch cable to an XLR cable from the front of the vocaster to the channel four on the mixer. On channel four, I simply pressed main mix. I did not press submix of this particular channel. This is very important. So that means any audio coming out of the vocaster was coming out of channel four. And I was able to adjust the slider to be equal to the other three sliders. That audio from the main mix was then piped through mymixer into the house audio using their speakers that they have. Because they had an XLR connector that went from the back of the speaker to their mixer. We simply pulled their mixer out and put my mixer in line with that particular audio. So let me recap this real quick. Channels one, two and three are XLR inputs. Using the wireless microphones, they have submix one and main mix pressed on their channels. Channel four is a quarter inch out of the vocaster into the mixer with only main mix pressed. That means everything with main mix press. So all four channels is going to the speakers in person, but only submix is going to zoom. And so that was the three microphones kind of hacked together. A quick on improv scenario, though, because I needed my music app, which is what I was using to play pre recorded audio to play in person and over Zoom. So how we did that is we added the music app as a source for Loopback, which was powering the virtual mic that I was using to pull that audio out of the vocaster. And then I just went into the music app under the options and unchecked the box that was checked that said mute output. That way that output went through the main channel, but it also went through Zoom because it was virtually connected to that mix. This is a very versatile, and I'm pretty happy with this particular mixer, because there's some cool things you can do. One of the things that I can do is this. Do you hear. Do you hear the echo that I'm giving you? This. It threw me off for a minute, actually, because I forgot that I had some effects playing. And then all of a sudden, we plugged everything up, and then we were getting echo, and it took me a minute to realize it. But if you're looking for an easy to use, very tactile mixer, it seems to be pretty solid. It does have a power switch, so if you want something that'll let you turn it off, then definitely check this mixer out. It looks like there's a lot more that I can do with this particular unit that I may not be taking full advantage of. But I'll tell you what, it solved a problem that I had. And again, that problem was letting people in person hear themselves and then letting Zoom be heard in person, but not hear the zoom selves. Oh, real quick. One pro tip. If you want to give a good experience for people listening on zoom, enable original sound. That way it makes those on Zoom feel a little bit more like they're part of the meeting.
Identifying a song with Siri. Have you ever been someplace where you're walking around, say, in a store, or maybe riding in someone's car, and a song comes on that you really like a lot, and you can't figure out what song it is? So what you would do in this situation is you would activate Siri. You would ask, Siri, what song is this? You would wait a second. Siri listens and then comes back with, hopefully, the name of the song and the artist that is singing that song. And there you go. That's how you find. Find out what music you're listening to using Siri.