 A new Ecamm Live beta has just been released and it's got an awesome feature that I know you're going to love Hello, welcome to Take One Tech. My name is Alec and in this video we're we are talking about the latest beta release of Ecamm Live version 3.10 and it is beta 7. Now if you are a regular Ecamm user and you're not on the beta program then there's nothing to do in terms of application or anything like that. It is a public beta and you can get it simply by going over to ecamm.com slash beta and that'll take you to this website where you can download the beta here and install it. It does run in parallel with the regular program, so you don't need to worry about that. You're not making a choice between one or the other and you can do things in one, close it down and then open the other one up and just work in that one just as you had been used to. So definitely worth giving it a try because we do get access to some great new features by trying out the beta. I use it exclusively really. I rarely open up the regular version so I do find that the beta, although the point of a beta is that it is for testing, I do find that they're generally pretty stable. So there is that then also if you are using the beta then definitely head over to the Facebook group as well. So that is facebook.com slash groups slash Ecamm Live beta and there you will see lots of great information and conversation all about the beta and you can add your comments and feedback relating to the beta in there. So that is just another point actually if you are using the Ecamm Live beta then do keep conversations related to it and its features in that Facebook group rather than the regular Ecamm group so that we don't confuse people who aren't using the regular beta. Anyway with that out of the way then let's get into this awesome new feature that I've been telling you about. I don't want to keep you in suspense anymore so I won't. Let's just get up the features that came out from the release. Oh actually I should say if you are using the Ecamm beta and you want to update then if you've just opened it up it should prompt you but if not then go to the Ecamm beta menu in the menu bar and then select check for updates and just go through the update process. So that should hopefully be relatively straightforward. So then once you have done that you will get these release notes that tell you what has been added into this particular version and the three ones you want to pay attention to are the top three. Well the others are fixes down below but the first three are the three new features. The top one is the one that you're going to be really crazy about I'm sure adds a virtual mic feature to the outputs menu. I'm going to come on to explaining what that is and why it's important in a moment but the other two features are related to playback in playlists in your sound effects panel and I'll explain those as well so there's two extra bits of functionality that have been added in there but what is the virtual mic and why is it important? For a long time now we've had a virtual camera in Ecamm Live and what that enables you to do is then feed your output from Ecamm Live into another application such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Discord or wherever you happen to be wanting to use video so that then basically when you are in those applications and selecting your camera you are selecting the Ecamm Live virtual camera. The point of that is it brings all of the amazing production values that you can create with Ecamm Live and feeds those into your otherwise dull and boring Zoom meetings. Sorry for the assumption there so that is what that is used for. Now up until now we haven't had the way to get all of the audio out of Ecamm Live directly into those applications so we've had to use third-party applications such as loopback, black hole or other options were available and what do I mean by that? Well it means that when you're in Zoom then we could have selected our regular microphone as the microphone in Zoom but then we wouldn't get any of the audio that was being passed through Ecamm Live such as if you were playing a video or had sound effects or anything like that then those wouldn't be fed into the meeting and so in order to do that we needed third-party software like loopback which basically allows you to sort of merge different audio sources on your computer so merging the mic with the Ecamm Live sound effects and bringing those into Zoom instead and so there was always this third-party application that we needed in the middle and Ecamm Live, very user friendly, easy to get your head around, loopback often not so much for a lot of people. I know that I was often getting questions about loopback and how to set it up and various other different things and whether people even needed it because it wasn't something that people needed in all instances. Well all of that is a thing of the past thank you Ecamm for this release because now we just have a simple virtual mic in exactly the same way that we had virtual camera before we can toggle it on and then Zoom or Discord or Teams will then see this as the microphone input but let me not just keep talking about it let me actually show you because it's really easy to install and use as well. So the way that we're going to install this is if we come up to menu at the top and what you want to do is go into the output menu so it's in the same place before as we had our virtual camera so if we go into there you'll see now just underneath the virtual camera in fact down here you'll see that there's the virtual camera and then also we've got the virtual mic and then now if you go into that one that little sub-menu you can see that you've got the option here where is it there to install the virtual mic. Now once you install the virtual mic it's click on that button it will prompt you to input your password for your Mac and then once you've done that then you'll get this little pop-up saying that the virtual mic has been installed. So then what we do is we basically come back into that menu and you can see that now next to the virtual mic where is it there it's saying that it's on if ever you do need to uninstall it you can just uninstall it from that menu as well you can see that we've also got a keyboard shortcut to toggle it on which is command shift k or command option shift k just bear in mind that some of these keyboard shortcuts may potentially be slightly different depending on which country you're in or if you've got anything else set up with them but so those are the defaults built in keyboard shortcuts that you can assign to toggle this thing on and off and when I say toggling on and off what you'll see is when it is on if you are looking at your ECAM window so imagine this is your ECAM window with all of the different buttons and things like that around the outside of it and then you'll see this thing over on this side which tells you here I've got my video monitor out I've got my virtual camera on and you've now got this one which says mic out so that just illustrates that the or indicates rather that the virtual mic is on. So what do we do with it then well then we come over to our other application of choice zoom discord whichever it is and so I've got my settings for zoom open here and you can see that what I'm doing here is I'm using my virtual mic and sorry I'm using my regular mic my short mv7 coming into zoom and so you can see the levels jumping up and down as I'm speaking but now if I were to play a sound effect in in ECAM live uh oh I didn't do something stupid uh oh I didn't do something so that has played in ECAM but you'll notice that there was no levels jumping up and down when it was playing because although you could hear it it was in ECAM it was not being brought into zoom and that is exactly the issue that the virtual mic solves so now if I come into my zoom and I can come down here you'll see that we've got ECAM live virtual mic uh so I just click on that one and now my audio is still coming through because instead of it coming directly from my mic it's rooting basically through ECAM so you can still see in zoom that the little levels are popping up and down but then if I were to play a sound effect in ECAM uh oh I didn't do something stupid uh oh you can see the levels are still jumping up and down indicating that uh the audio is then coming through so problem solved no need for loop back simple as that uh you may obviously be using this for other purposes but uh certainly for ECAM into zoom and the like it's no longer necessary so that is the virtual mic feature and I think a lot of people are going to be very happy as I say but what are the other two features that I mentioned well they're related to playlists in the sound effects window so the sound effects menu you can access in ECAM live by coming over to the little menu here and pressing this button that will bring up the sound effects panel and when we're talking about playlists we're talking about groups of sound effects so in the sound effects panel as well as having all of your different sound effects you can as you can see I've done here group them as well and so what that means is and by the way you do that just by clicking here to add a new group name it whatever you want and add in the sound effects the thing about groups of sound effects is it means that as well as actually playing the individual tracks just by clicking on them like this what you can also do is you can play the group or playlist as a whole by clicking on the play button that is here next to the folder instead if you do that then using this little cogwheel here you can then also loop these tracks if I have that one toggled on basically what that's going to do is just play through and loop through all of these tracks so that's great if you want to have some constant background music of a series of looping tracks or whatever so that is all nothing new what is new is they've now added the forward and backward skip buttons so you can use this to skip between different tracks by clicking like that and then what you can also do though is now it does work with apples built-in media keys so where on your keyboard you've got the the play pause things like that and the skip forward and backwards track those now work with ecam so if I press the pause which is f8 on my keyboard it pauses the music and if I press play again it will play the playlist and then if I use the skip forwards and backwards then it will actually go forwards and backwards through those tracks so that is the other functionality that was added in if I just pause this music that was the other functionality that was added in apart from the virtual camera sorry virtual mic but the virtual mic is a biggie so I hope you found that useful if you did as always don't forget to like and subscribe let me know what you like about the beta in general and any feature requests that you've got and don't forget to drop those in the ecam live beta group as well so that's all for now and if you've really enjoyed this then there is always my buy me a coffee page to support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis now I'm going to leave a link to some of my other ecam live videos over on the right hand side so don't go anywhere and youtube is going to pick another great video for you just up at the top there as well so until the next time have a great day