Chris Sturm's Comments on Audio in Elluminate

One of our grad students complained about the quality of his Elluminate Live connection. He's on a Mac and uses a cable modem to connect to the Internet. The sound varies in quality, and he gets dropped from the sessions. Also, his sound does not work through his headphones. Here are Chris's comments:

There are a couple of things to do right away. First is as Jim mentioned, change the connection speed to reflect a lower speed than the student actually has, such as 56K, if necessary. Cable Modem speeds are not constant and flucuate depending on the neighborhood traffic. If the student has a lot of people in his neighborhood with a cable modem and they are all on late in the afternoon, the cable modem speed will slow. Therefore, adjusting the connection speed is very prudent. The connection speed is what affects the sound of the voice – eLive doesn’t want to drop any of the voice information and so speeds it up.

Second is to test the headset outside of eLive. I presume that the student is using a USB headset. If so and he plugs it in before the session, he may need to check his system preferences before entering the eLive session to see if his Mac has accepted the input device as the USB headset and not the built-in microphone.

Third is to clear the Java Cache. This has been helpful from time-to-time as it clears any eLive modules that may have become corrupted. To do this, the student will have to go into the APPLICATIONS folder, then UTILITIES and then JAVA. In this folder is a JAVA 1.4.2 Plugin settings application. The middle tab is CACHE and from there he’ll need to click on the CLEAR button. This will mean reloading the eLive modules the next time that he enters an eLive session, but with his connection, that shouldn’t be a problem.

For the differeing volume levels, that is related to the levels set by individual students. Version 8 has an auto-leveling feature that equalizes all the voices in the session.