So, I was having some serious issues with Ustream.tv recently, and it didn’t look like anyone could help me out. It took a while for the Ustream.tv live support to realize I am not an idiot and the problem wasn’t between the keyboard and chair. We narrowed it down slowly to their client system. Why would neither computer be able to record audio, despite using different browsers, different flash versions, different microphones, on computers with different operating systems?

The answer was one of those moments where you slap yourself in the head. There is an audio quality slider. I assumed it didn’t do anything but improve or decrease the audio quality, but when I moved the slider to its maximum, suddenly, my audio was getting through. As I slowly moved it down, it continued to work until I got to around 13kHz, where it just stopped.

I was never able to find out why the audio slider was responsible for the problem, and frankly, I don’t care. I am just happy to be able to record audio with my videos on Ustream.tv once again.

So next time I have a live session, hopefully more of you will show up, and I will have working audio next time. I really love the Ustream.tv platform, and having tried some of their competitors, I am ready to say that Ustream.tv is the best and despite the issue I had, it was worth figuring out so that I didn’t have to deal with the quality issues and user interface issues that other services have.

Sidenote Suggestion

So, if you work at Ustream.tv and are reading this, I have a suggestion for the company. Jonathan Snook and I realized that while video is great, being a talking head isn’t always what I want to be in front of a large audience. I know there is an easy way to just broadcast audio, but it would be nice if it offered MP3 downloads of all shows. That way people could subscribe to the audio portion of my video streams, if they don’t want to watch me talk.

If you could make it so people could download MP3’s from the videos, be they recording video and audio or just audio, I would really appreciate it, as your sound quality is so much better than most of the other services out there today, and you would quickly become one of the biggest one to many audio broadcasting services out there.

Originally posted on March 18, 2008 @ 12:16 pm