It doesn't "mute your keyboard" it "mutes everything" which isn't very useful in a meeting.
It’s useful if you are able to stop typing when you need to talk.
Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
51–60 of 193 posts
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#52A solution like rtx voice seems a better way to go tbh. For those who don't know, it's an nvidia thing that uses a GPU accelerated (ofc, it's nvidia) neural network to denoise voice calls, from all kinds of noise, not just typing. It's really pretty impressive, here's a demo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uWUHkCgslNE I wish it wasn't proprietary though (and worse, hardware specific). And windows only of course.
For me noisetorch [0] (based on RNNoise [1][2]) works pretty good. I'm using RTX Voice while I'm working on Windows and noisetorch while working on manjaro. RTX Voice seems to work a bit better, but noisetorch compares really well to it. I have a microphone which has static noise and is not really mechanical decoupled from my table. Both applications are good at cancelling that kind of noise. Noisetorch is a bit more…
It's worth noting that RNNoise uses way less resources than RTX Voice and doesn't require a GPU. There's a new paper by Jean-Marc Valin (RNNoise author) about a new and improved version PercepNet[0] that's also very light on resource usage, but it's currently lacking an open source implementation. I found someone working on that here[1]. So if anyone here has the time and ML chops to open source a PercepNet implementation, that would bring open source noise suppression quite a bit forward.
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#53It doesn't "mute your keyboard" it "mutes everything" which isn't very useful in a meeting.
How often are you typing and speaking at the same time though? I’m not talented enough to do that, personally. :)
I think this app is really clever. I would definitely use it if my version of macOS wasn’t nearly a decade too old.
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#54You already have a mute button.. do you really want to deal with unplanned un-muting as opposed to planned muting?
You do not have a hardware mute button. There is an output mute, but not an input mute. I wrote one in about 10 lines of AppleScript and associated it with a hot key. It ~mostly~ works. If you are talking about the application-specific software mute, I had such a terrible time finding it amongst all my open tabs and latency every time I wanted to type or speak that I wrote the above hardware-ish button.
I wrote a Hammerspoon script to do the same, but Microsoft Teams unmutes the default input every time you join a call. Did you run into this/have any idea how to get around it?
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do not have a hardware mute button. There is an output mute, but not an input mute. I wrote one in about 10 lines of AppleScript and associated it with a hot key. It ~mostly~ works. If you are talking about the application-specific software mute, I had such a terrible time finding it amongst all my open tabs and latency every time I wanted to type or speak that I wrote the above hardware-ish button.
Use a keyboard shortcut. Since you only need it when typing, your fingers are there when you need it.
GP did set it up to a keyboard shortcut. The problem they're calling out is needing to do it to the global input rather than app-specific. Many people use multiple VTC apps throughout the day.
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#56For the opposite effect, install `bucklespring` to enjoy an authentic classic clacking on any keyboard (most convenient on GNU/Linux, packaged for the biggest distros). “This project emulates the sound of my old faithful IBM Model-M space saver bucklespring keyboard while typing on my notebook, mainly for the purpose of annoying the [heck] out of my coworkers. Bucklespring runs as a background process and plays back…
hmm acquired taste perhaps
https://youtu.be/21AuWT1lDMc?t=13
although not sure if same sound as the repo you linked
though I do use a mechanical keyboard at home
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#57It doesn't "mute your keyboard" it "mutes everything" which isn't very useful in a meeting.
How often are you typing and speaking at the same time though? I’m not talented enough to do that, personally. :) I think this app is really clever. I would definitely use it if my version of macOS wasn’t nearly a decade too old.
Hmm.. I type and talk at the same time. It's not all the time, but I talk in meeting while I'm still typing the last part of my sentence.
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#58You already have a mute button.. do you really want to deal with unplanned un-muting as opposed to planned muting?
IMO mute should be the default in most meetings; plenty of apps (I know Zoom and Skype) have the spacebar as a "push to talk" button. PTT should be a standard in most meetings. I used to play eve online, having a few hundred people in a voice channel would be impossible if push-to-talk wasn't made mandatory.
Honestly boggles my mind that software like Google Meet hides the mute button if you stop moving your mouse and PTT isn't considered a base feature.
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#59For anyone that's tried them both - how does it compare to krisp.ai? I've been using Krisp since the start of 2020 and have been really happy with both its audio performance and that it doesn't seem to use excessive CPU/GPU, not to mention that it doesn't require nvidia hardware. Krisp is a paid, closed source product however.
I'm almost certain that Unclack isn't doing any audio-processing magic. It simply knows when you're typing because, you know, keyboard are part of your computer, and mutes when enough keys are pressed in a short enough window of time. It shouldn't use any significant resources at all.
Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
#60I thought this was going to be an app that emits some kind of inverse sound through the laptop speakers to neutralize the keypress sound in real life. I wonder if that's possible.