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

unclack.app

101–110 of 193 posts

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

#101
post #96

The sentence explaining what it does has a typo which makes it confusing: > Unclack is the small but mighty Mac utility that mutes your keyboard while you type. This should say "mutes your _microphone_ while you type". You can't mute a keyboard

Colloquially we say "mute yourself" or "mute this or that person," so it functions in that context.

In that case, “mutes yourself” would be more appropriate.

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

#102
post #18

For 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…

For folks like me who _had_ to hear this in action:

https://youtu.be/Y7dKyGoqn9w?t=30

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

#103
post #18

For 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…

Oh I loved my Model-M Space Saver, collected quite a few of them. Co-workers did sometimes comment/complain but not that often. I also had this habit of moving my cursor keys up/down/left/right in rapid/slow movements while I was thinking deeply on a problem. Combined with how loud and that it clicks on each downpress and clacks on release was quite the cacophony.

Mechanical keyboards are like fidget spinners in a way, they satisfy a craving for tactile/auditory feedback that some of us need. I was never bit by fidget spinners but I do have some keyboard habits like the one you described above.

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

#104

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.

Active sound cancellation is an incredibly hard problem if you don't know the position of the listener.

The listener in this case is the microphone, so it has a fixed position related to the sound it would cancel (the keys).

So the issue in this case is just that the sound keys produce varies.

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

#107

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.

No need to go through the speakers, you could detect keystrokes, map them to transients in the recorded audio stream and use a noise gate to reduce their volume (at the cost of a little added latency). Bonus point: this would allow you to speak and type at the same time with minimal reduction of speech comprehension, especially if using a multi-band noise gate (that acts on various frequency bands independently). It'…

What he means is hiding the keypress sounds to the local user, not to the recording.

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

#109

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.

nvidia has some software that you can install if you have a compatible GPU which will take your webcam stream and blur your background or do other background effects. I suppose the challenge here would be to figure out which parts of the audio are the speaker's voice and which parts aren't, and remove the parts that aren't.

If the visualization of the audio is such that you can discern speech from other audio, similar to how you can discern the person's silhouette and figure out where the background is, then in theory it should be possible using the same technique.

I suppose there are probably some pure audio processing techniques that don't rely on the visualization as well.

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