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Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

unclack.app

61–70 of 193 posts

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#61

I 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.

Unfortunately the percussive clacks from a keyboard are probably too broad spectrum to neutralize. These transient waveforms are hard to beat.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#62

I 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.

Me too. I still have no idea what this thing is doing. An excellent example for a poorly written landing page.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#63
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had people complain they couldn't hear me well when I used their (deprecated) iOS app. I kept having to turn off the ML noise-cancelling.

Have you used the internal mic? I found out that if the phone is too far away, the voice would flagged as ‚background chatting‘ and therefore muted. Once I connected a headset those issues went away.

I was using standard corded iPhone earpods.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#64
post #2

This made me do a double take: "The key board on Macs has artificial clacking?" but of course this actually mutes your microphone, not your keyboard.

Certain model M keyboards have speakers in them, possibly for audio feedback for the otherwise quiet keyboard. /s

Haven't used a Model M in 25 years but this comment brought me back to that time, wondering what the apparent speaker grill underneath was. For those who are also curious, here's what Wikipedia says:

>Until the late 4th-generation variants, most Model Ms have a 1.25" slotted, circular speaker grille in their bottom surfaces. Relatively few contain an actual speaker, however, which was useful only for sounding beep codes on older terminal systems. The most common P/Ns with speakers are 1394540 and 51G872, made for RS/6000 UNIX workstations.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I kinda get it if I move my mouse away as it shows more of the participant video. But if I am hovering over the mute button don't hide it!

It is very frustrating.

On GNOME I have set up a hotkey to mute my microphone (this is available but unbound by default). It is amazing as it works for all applications and doesn't matter what window is focused. The only downside is that you don't get the mute indicator.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#66
post #2

This made me do a double take: "The key board on Macs has artificial clacking?" but of course this actually mutes your microphone, not your keyboard.

My mouse only has artificial clicking. It's a rollermouse without any real click in the roller-bar. It's quite trippy to disable the clicking-sound, suddenly it doesn't feel like I'm actually pressing the bar. But with sound it feels like I have haptic feedback.

I think the trackpad on my previous mac was similar? Or, it had haptic feedback, but it was artificial and could be tweaked in SW.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#67

I 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.

Unfortunately the percussive clacks from a keyboard are probably too broad spectrum to neutralize. These transient waveforms are hard to beat.

Budum-tish.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#68

I 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.

Me too. I still have no idea what this thing is doing. An excellent example for a poorly written landing page.

It says it mutes the mic while you type.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#69
When I downloaded it the DMG file was 12.2Mb. I was suspicious of why an app this small in function would require such a large download, and looked inside, but the actual contents was only 1.4Mb, half of which was icons etc., which seems much more reasonable. If I right click on Unclack.app and choose "compress", I get a file under 1Mb in size.

Does this always happen with DMG files, or is there something weird going on here? This file is 10× bigger than it could be.

Re: Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type

#70
post #44
post #7

A 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…

If anyone knows how to configure pulseaudio to use both RNNoise and module-echo-cancel together, I'd very much appreciate some pointers. My results have been a very distorted robotic voice.
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