{"id":91395,"date":"2020-05-19T06:32:08","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T13:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/?p=91395"},"modified":"2020-06-26T10:11:34","modified_gmt":"2020-06-26T17:11:34","slug":"how-to-improve-your-zoom-skype-or-facetime-call-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/how-to-improve-your-zoom-skype-or-facetime-call-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Top 5 ways to improve your Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime call experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For many people who are working from home for the first time, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, and other video-conferencing services have become essential communication tools. People use these for meetings, but also to keep in touch with friends and family. These apps are easy to use, but the way you experience them can be jarring if you’re not used to this sort of communication.<\/p>\n

Improving the experience in videoconferencing is both about how you see and hear others, and how they see and hear you. The success of meetings and calls with these apps depends on everyone involved in a call or meeting ensuring that their audio and video is as good as possible.<\/p>\n

In this article, I’m going to give you some tips to improve your experience on Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, and other video-conferencing apps.<\/p>\n

Use a fast Wi-Fi connection<\/h3>\n

The main thing you need for successful video calls is bandwidth. (If you only use audio, the amount of bandwidth you need is quite small.) If you have a very fast Internet connection and a strong Wi-Fi signal (or a computer that’s wired into the network with an Ethernet cable), this is generally not a problem. However, for important calls or meetings, you need to make sure that your bandwidth is as unencumbered as possible.<\/p>\n

With more limited bandwidth, it’s a good idea to check to see if any other devices are using a lot of data. The main culprits are, of course, video: if you have a couple of kids at home streaming video in 4K, you might want to ask them to pause for the duration of your meeting. But you may also have apps that are using bandwidth on your computer. If, for example, you use an online backup service, or you have devices automatically backing up to the cloud, or downloading updates, this can affect your call quality. Pausing these can free up bandwidth.<\/p>\n

Quit other apps<\/h3>\n

Some people find that their computers get very hot when using video-conferencing tools, and their fans go very fast, making a lot of noise. This is because video apps can be processor intensive. Quit as many apps as you can, and, if you have lots of browser tabs open, close them or quit your browser if possible. You can check in Activity Monitor to see which apps are using a lot of CPU, which means they are working a lot on your Mac’s processor; quitting unneeded apps can help. (Learn more about using Activity Monitor in this article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Improving audio<\/h3>\n

The way you and other participants experience video calls is through audio and video. This may seem obvious, but these are the two areas that you need to consider to make your experience as good as possible.<\/p>\n

If you are in a quiet environment, in a small room with carpeting and curtains, an internal microphone in an iMac or MacBook Pro will provide decent audio. But in other conditions, especially in rooms with hard surfaces that reflect sound, rather than absorb it, the sound can be terrible. Remember that participants don’t hear the full audio quality that you send: this audio is compressed, making it often sound worse than audio on phone calls.<\/p>\n

Getting an external microphone can make a huge difference to the quality of these calls. You don’t have to spend a lot, getting a full rig with a microphone, boom, and audio input, such as I use for podcasting. Here are three options:<\/p>\n

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