Captions are made from the sound that reaches the computer running the Console. The best sound is a clean feed of the speaking microphones, straight from your sound desk. A microphone in the room picks up echo, the band and the congregation, and the captions suffer for it.
What you need
- A spare output on the desk. An aux or monitor send, a matrix output, or a record output. Any output you can send the speaking microphones to works.
- A way into the computer. Most laptops have no line input, so use a small USB audio interface: a cable from the desk output to the interface input, and USB from the interface to the computer.
- Or a digital connection. If your desk already shows up on the computer, over USB or a Dante network, you need no extra box. Pick that input on the Console.
Set it up
- On the desk, choose the spare output and send it the speaking microphones: the pulpit, the lectern, the host. Leave the band out, or keep it low. Music gives the captions nothing to write, and you can pause translation during songs anyway.
- Set that send so it does not follow the main volume (pre-fader, on most desks). Then the level stays the same when the sound engineer turns the room up or down.
- Connect the output to the input of your USB interface, and the interface to the computer.
- On the Console, in Where does the sound come from?, set Feed to Sound desk input and choose the interface under Device.
- Speak into the pulpit microphone and check that Level says Speaking. If it is too quiet, turn the send up on the desk, not on the computer.
Check it before Sunday
Run a short session on a weekday, with someone speaking into the real microphones, and read the captions on a phone. Most first-Sunday problems are about this cable, and a weekday test finds them. See Run a session from the console for the sound check, and Before your first translated service for the rest of the checklist.