Mark, I use Cleanfeed to bring in a remote announcer to interact with in a live situation and like it a lot since the latency is so low, less than a second. It would be great to integrate Cleanfeed into PlayIt Live's Aux Input to be able to do a remote/OB feed with no one at the studio. But PIL would have to be able to send its own audio output (minus the Aux Input) to the Cleanfeed interface for that to work without having an external mixer involved.
--Tom in Wisconsin
Mark Hawkins
I’ve been experimenting with a very convenient remote contribution service called Cleanfeed.
https://cleanfeed.net/
It is an alternative to Skype, Zoom etc. for remote contributors to a radio programme.
In practice you will need to use this with a “physical” mixer and one that will generate a “mix minus” for the channel you are connecting it to.
In my setup I have channel 8 of my mixer set to be the “telco” channel and that channel has an associated “mix minus” (made from a post fader mix of channels 1 – 7 only so everything but that channel).
To use “Cleanfeed” you create an account and open the service in Google Chrome.
At that point (if it’s all set up correctly) you can see a line with a microphone symbol and a green waggly bar showing the audio you are sending to the computer running the browser.
I used a dedicated computer (not also running PlayIt Live or anything else and I recommend this approach).
You can create a link to email to a contributor; I did that and on (yet another) computer opened the link. This (contributor) computer had a USB headset connected and I used that to be the contributor.
It all worked really well, I tested a contribution into the studio mixer and it sounded good.
The cue programme from the mixer sounded fine in the contributor headset and all the levels seemed OK.
As much as anything else so I could review how the experiment went, I set a recording going within “Cleanfeed” and downloaded it at the end of the test.
On the free version of “Cleanfeed” the recording is all of the contributors and studio in an equal mix (if you have the paid “Pro” version one of the things you can do is download recordings with each contributor separately see: https://cleanfeed.net/knowledge/recording-to-separate-tracks )
For more information about “Cleanfeed” see https://cleanfeed.net/faq
(Note: I’m well aware that “Cleanfeed” is a well used term for “Mix-Minus” and actually “Cleanfeed” would be my preferred term but to avoid massive confusion I’ve stuck to “Mix-Minus” for the mixer feature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix-minus in this write up)