Since people are remaining inside and unable to attend weddings, birthday celebrations, and other events, we depend on streaming to broadcast live events and stay connected with essential family members, friends, and business partners. For your material to be heard by as many people as possible when being live streamed, you must ensure that your live streaming audio should be at its optimum.
What matters is that you care for someone, whether it is your grandmother in a nursing home, your employer across the country, or a live event you have worked so hard for and want to share with the world. In this piece, we will provide six strategies to help you enhance the audio quality of your live streams, whether they are chats or events.
For a variety of causes, a bad sound during a concert may occur. Wondering how to improve live streaming? Although performing in a new location has its own set of obstacles, there are a few things you can do to ensure that your live sound is as fantastic as it can be.
10 Tips to Improve Your Live Streaming Audio
1. Use high quality camera and microphone
For a live streaming audio setup, use an excellent quality camera and microphone. A high-quality mic will allow you to record with less background noise, making the best sounding streaming experience. Also, if the amplifiers, acoustic instruments, and microphones are not properly situated, you may have shrieking feedback or loudness imbalances. Make sure your amp is a little closer to you than the other musicians and facing your head if you are playing through an amplifier (and not your knees).
2. Preparation of the venue
On stage, the sound should be tuned to ensure that the artists are satisfied; at the venue, it is all about providing a terrific experience for the public. For example, if the venue speakers are placed too near to the ground, the audience in the front would be blasted while the audience in the rear will hear a completely different tone from the front. You should keep in mind the right arrangements for all the things.
3. Microphone method
Wondering how to improve sound on Facebook live? Standard voice microphones like the Shure SM58 sound best within an inch or two of the performers. The sound suffers if the vocalist is too close to the mike. And if you sing into this mic from a few feet away, the soundperson may not be able to hear you. Listen up! Now you know how to increase or balance volume on live streaming video. This is an important tip to remember while using a microphone and for better experience.
4. EQ levels
The correct levels (volume) and EQ settings may go a long way. I am a major fan of EQing (here is a primer if you want to learn more) since with the appropriate EQ settings all instruments in a band can fit together nicely; without excellent EQ settings, there is a fair chance you will wind up in a loudness war and the most probable winner will be muddy sound. You can also try mixing audio for live broadcasts.
5. Use correct encoder settings
If you are not delivering an enjoyable experience for your viewers, they will not want to watch your content and go elsewhere. If you want to provide successful live streaming, you will have to use either 5 – 6 Mbps with either H.264/AVC or HEVC. However, this number drops significantly because of cellular data limitations and other factors like signal strength, poor bandwidth, live stream sound is not working. The best way to choose your encoding settings is by understanding the needs of your audience and their streaming conditions and limitations.
6. Use High-speed internet connection
One of the biggest live stream audio problems is a poor internet connection. You should ensure that you have a reliable, high-speed internet connection to sustain high-quality live streaming audio and video. If you want to deliver HD-quality video, you need to have enough capacity to accept the requests from 100s of users, asking for high-quality, high-bitrate video from your server. Also, you can use a CDN to deliver video from your origin server.
7. Use Analytics
For better live streaming audio and video, you must use an analytics service (or DIY) to collect usage/consumption statistics in addition to QoE and QoS information. Here is some of the essential information that can help you analyze the quality of your live streams.
- Latency or Start-Up Delay
- Buffering Duration & Percentage
- Number of Starts
- Exit Before Video Start
- Track Ad Fill Rates, Ad QoE, Completion Rates, Quartiles of Completion, etc., to optimize ad delivery.
8. Use a professional video platform
Select the right online video platform to maximize the live streaming audio and video performance. Here are three important things to look for a high-quality video experience:
- Content delivery network: You should know how the OVP is distributing the content
- Resolution: Choose an OVP that allows you to broadcast in full 1080P HD.
- Support: Choose an OVP that offers 24/7 customer support
9. Choose optimal resolution
Choosing the perfect resolution requires a piece of good knowledge. For a clear view of your video, you should know that “highest resolution” does not equal the “best resolution” in live streaming audio and video. It would help if you opted for a resolution that provides a clear image without lagging. Professionally, renowned broadcasters typically opt for 1280 x 720 pixels (720p) or 1920 x 1080 pixels (1080p).
10. Test before you stream
Streaming video has many moving parts, so you should test before starting your streaming.
- Use these questions as a guide for your pre-stream testing:
- Test if the video is embedded on your website. Is everything visible?
- Suppose using multi-bitrate streaming, test video quality at different bitrate levels.
- Test streaming on both slow and fast internet connections. Is buffering minimal?
- Do stress testing for cameras, encoders, and other live streaming equipment.
- Make a test live stream and broadcast privately. Then notice if everything is working correctly or not.
- If your video streaming software and equipment have passed all these tests, then you are good to go.
Knowing these essentials will help you enhance your live streaming audio and video. We have just touched on a few topics here, but if you have any questions, please let us know in the comments sections below!