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

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

#42
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.

I have thought it silences keyboard in a room completely with some active noise canceling magic. Such would be helpful to not wake up my spouse at night.

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

#43
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

Please don't post sarcasm. You can make an equivalent statement ("it almost seems...", "I can imagine...") without the needless twist into a false/sarcastic formulation that just makes your post needlessly harder to understand.

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

#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 focused on suppressing noise while you're not talking, which is the use case of the posted article. RTX Voice is better at suppressing noise while talking, which you can hear in Nvidias demos as well.

[0] https://github.com/lawl/NoiseTorch

[1] https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice/

[2] https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/

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

#46
post #13

You 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.

Use a keyboard shortcut. Since you only need it when typing, your fingers are there when you need it.

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

#47
Here's a tip from people I know that do streaming from their computer: get the microphone off your desk. Find something else to put it on or buy an arm it can attach to. The fact that your device or mic are sitting on your desk where the keyboard clack vibrations are traveling right through amplifies them.

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

#48
post #13

You 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.

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

#49
post #3

Is it Big Sur only?

According to the FAQ, yes: https://unclack.app/faq/#/

Huge bummer. It would be nice though if the FAQ included a short technical explanation for this limitation, similar to how it explains "Why does Unclack need Accessibility access?".
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