In July 2024, Professor Iain Murray posted some tips to help with online meetings.
We thought they were so good that we've reposted them here.

Iain Murray's tips

Outlook's booking page

After a one-off setup cost, you can routinely respond to "can we meet some time" emails with a link and no further back and forth. Set it up here:

https://outlook.office.com/bookings/homepage

It's been a breath of fresh air! Anyone (no account needed) can pick a meeting slot. It sends calendar invites and (if you want) a Teams meeting.

Any events in your calendar (including tentative invites, until you decline them) automatically stop clashing meeting slots from being offered. So with a bit of effort you can probably set up the booking page once, and then leave it alone for some time.

You can specify lots of things: when you're prepared to meet, how long meetings should be, whether to have buffer time, how last-minute someone may book a meeting, how far ahead they can book, and whether to email reminders and when. If you like, you can create multiple blocks of meetings with different settings for different purposes.

Warning: if a meeting group is set to private, its share URL changes every time you change any of its meeting settings. It's easier to set to "public", and the share URL stays the same. Regardless, the URL is really long, so you probably want a short/friendly version. I use a redirect from my homepages.inf page, with a .htaccess file line like this:

https://outlook.office.com/bookwithme/user/REST_OF_YOUR_BOOKWITHME_URL?anonymous

Doodle replacement

For one-off group meetings and polls, also check out the doodle-replacement that Amos recommended in 2022:

https://strawpoll.com/

Zoom meeting links with passwords

This tip is to work around two zoom annoyances:

  1. Zoom links try to open the app, and the link to use a web-browser is small and hard to find.
  2. The University doesn't let us embed meeting passwords in the URL, whereas for most of my use-cases, zoom bombing isn't a risk.

Instructions:

  • Go to
    https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting#/upcoming

    and find the meeting you want to share, e.g. in the "Personal Room" tab.

  • Press the start button for the meeting. Click the link in the tiny text near the bottom: "Having issues with the Zoom Workplace app? Join from Your Browser"
  • After it's finished redirecting and started the meeting, the URL will look like this:
    https://app.zoom.us/wc/XXXXXXXXXX/start?fromPWA=1&pwd=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
  • If you replace start in that URL with join, others can use it to join the meeting in a web-browser without having to type in a password, or hunt for the tiny "Join from Your Browser" link.
  • If you do want a link that tries to open the zoom app (with a tiny option to use a browser), then modify it further to look like this:
    https://app.zoom.us/j/XXXXXXXXXX/?pwd=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

For my use, I created a small web page with both links and the zoom meeting details in plain text, so my guests can use whatever's easiest for them. It looks like this:

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/zoom_eg_page

(There are no real zoom details there; links won't work.)

Sidetone

I've found myself talking loudly in online meetings. "Sidetone" is when you hear your own voice in your headphones (like telephones do), providing some feedback that you are audible. I think it helps me a bit, but doesn't completely solve the problem. Something that monitors my volume and pops up a warning would probably be good!

Some meeting headsets have sidetone built in. You could try borrowing a headset with this feature and see if it helps you. I have one...

If you use normal headphones, it may be possible to create sidetone in software, although if the latency is too high it will drive you crazy, and it does use some processing power. If you use Linux with pulse audio, this command-line should toggle audio loopback:

pactl unload-module module-loopback 2>&1 | grep -q 'Failed' && pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=1 > /dev/null

You can change the volume of the loopback device in pavucontrol on the playback tab (after showing all streams in the dropdown control). And you can get much more fancy with setting up sidetone on Linux, so that it starts and stops automatically:

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/linux/adding-mic-monitor...

I believe it's possible to set up sidetone in software on Mac and Windows too.

Microphone gain

When meeting apps automatically set the microphone gain, it is only a matter of time before I'm almost completely muted. Presumably because of my tendency to talk too loudly...

In Zoom, turning off "Automatically adjust microphone volume" is a must for me.

Unfortunately it is not possible to stop Teams messing with microphone gain. Except possibly with a browser extension (I haven't tried it, and cannot vouch for its security/trustworthyness):

https://github.com/joeywatts/disable-autogain-control-extension

In Linux, microphone gain can be adjusted with pavucontrol. But with Teams it's a perpetual fight. I now run the following shell loop while in meetings (does have some CPU usage):

#!/bin/sh
DEVICE=alsa_input.usb-046d_HD_Pro_Webcam_C920-02.analog-stereo
GAIN=65535
while true ; do pacmd set-source-volume "$DEVICE" "$GAIN"; sleep 1s; done

Look for possible DEVICE names with:

     pacmd list-sources | grep name:

and set the GAIN to some fraction of 65535 to set a gain of less than 100%.

Even then, Teams has just recently found a way to mess up my audio mid-meeting.
Turning noise suppression off and on has got me out of that so far.

Quick check your microphone is working in your browser

Click the first button record, and again to stop and have it play back immediately:

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/echo_recorder.html

It's all in-browser, the audio isn't sent anywhere. It doesn't let you choose microphone, so only tests whatever your browser default is (or in Firefox, what you select when you agree to microphone permissions).

Useful to see if microphone gain seems sensible.

Last reviewed: 
26/07/2024