Sometimes the lead singer becomes extremely quiet when they hit Start Singing

[jeffreykeller]

The server was being pretty wonky last night (2/22/2022, 7-10:30pm EST), but this was the most interesting problem:

3 of our singers (out of ~10) had the problem that, as soon as they hit Start Singing, they became almost completely inaudible, even though their volume was fine before that and was fine again after singing was halted.
Two of them were able to fix it by restarting the browser -- but not, I think, by refreshing the window. The third person got called away before they could try that. I believe the first two were both using Chrome, but I don't know what versions; dunno what the 3rd person was using.

Other problems I noticed:

• A couple of times, background hiss appeared as soon as Start Singing was hit (and went away after Stop Singing was hit). In one of those cases, I was the leader, and I heard it as well. (I was using current Chrome on Windows.)
• I had to ask 2-3 people to recalibrate because they were too loud. (It's not uncommon for people to mess up their calibration, and recalibration seemed to solve the problem, but it's not usually this common.)
• A bunch of times we had intermittent noise that was probably someone scraping their mic against something but which we weren't able to pin down. (Again, this isn't uncommon, but usually we're able to figure out who it's coming from.)
• At one point, we all got kicked out -- I assume the server crashed and restarted. (Maybe 9:30 or 10pm EST on 2/22/2022.)
• One person couldn't get his camera working, although it was probably just that he'd declined to grant access at some point and it wasn't asking him again.

I think the background hiss and the server crash might be related to the main problem, but the others are probably spurious.

[jeffreykeller]

I ran an intro-to-Bucket-Brigade-Singing session for NEFFA this evening. We had at least 17 people at peak, and 8 of them successfully led songs. (Most of the others didn't try, but some did and were unable for various reasons.)
The biggest problem was weird background noise (pretty loud, and quite distracting), which sometimes sounded like an SF movie sound track, sometimes more like crackling, and sometimes more like crosstalk. We all heard it, and even muting all the mics didn't seem to help. But we pushed ahead anyway and, oddly, it doesn't seem to show up in the recordings! Is the final mix in the recording generated by a different code path than the intermediate mixes? Or could it somehow be introduced to the audio output by the client?