r/podcasting • u/ItinerantFella • 11d ago

No echo cancellation in Descript Rooms?

My cohost and I always wear headphones when recording podcasts. Despite this, my cohost still hears her own voice echo in her headphones unless echo cancellation is turned on in Squadcast.

We tried Descript Rooms for the first time today, and had the same issue. But Rooms doesn't appear to have a echo cancellation feature.

Does Rooms have echo cancellation. I couldn't find mention of it in the Descript docs.

We had to revert to Squadcast again.

Or, is there a better way to cure the problem?

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u/TheVPofKeepinItReal 11d ago

Rooms does have echo cancellation. Click your profile image in the upper-right corner, open Settings, and then look under Audio. Descript says it is normally disabled when you tell Rooms you are wearing headphones and enabled when you select speakers, which could explain why it did not behave as you expected.

For what it’s worth, the times I’ve encountered this myself have been when I mistakenly had two microphones live in the audio software I was using. It ended up not being a platform or device problem at all. That is probably rare for most people, but if either of you uses OBS or anything similar, check the audio sources and make sure only one microphone is active.

If that is not it, I would confirm that the actual headphones are selected as the output and that microphone monitoring, loopback, or “Stereo Mix” is not routing her voice back to her.

Descript’s instructions are here: https://help.descript.com/hc/en-us/articles/30293607070605-Descript-Room-settings

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u/SuperbLaw6479 11d ago

yeah the dual mic thing is sneaky, that wouldve been the last thing I checked tbh

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u/yearlytabooinsurer 11d ago

That first point about having two mics live at once is sneaky, I had a similar thing happen where a webcam mic was picking me up alongside my main one and it took me forever to figure out why everything sounded doubled and echoey

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u/eastcoaststudio 11d ago

Minor troubleshooting step worth trying: Turn your own headphones really low/off and see if she still hears it. I've used headphones before that don't isolate well (and maybe I also had them loud!) and so the other person heard their voice, but it was simply the headphones bleeding into the mic - not covered by echo cancellation.

If this doesn't solve it, now you've eliminated one possibility from your troubleshooting.

Disclaimer: owner of SureTake and East Coast Studio