The best (and perhaps, the only) way to get your singing group setup is the following 2-step process. The setup for Windows / iOS / Android and other users is described in step 2 below. However, very important, is you need to do step 1 first, otherwise step 2 won’t work.
1) Start with a group of Mac users on Flock. As big as possible. But only Mac.
Follow the instructional videos on the home page and ensure everyone is setup and comfortable with how Flock works. The aim should be to get a big enough Mac group setup that you can hear the different parts and that it sounds like a choir! This is relatively easy to do. For each new Mac singer, ask them to test their Flock connection one-on-one with you in advance of connecting them with a bigger group. It usually takes 1 or 2 minutes to do so and to sing a line to determine if the latency is ok. For 90%+ of Mac users there are no problems connecting and hearing each other. For the remainder, it’s the same two or three issues that come up and are generally quick to resolve, e.g. singers using Wifi instead of wired internet, not using wired heaphones, etc. The troubleshooting article on this forum has more help.
2) Setup everyone else with the Zoom bridge
This applies to singers on Windows, iOS, Android and also to those singers on Mac who don’t meet the technical requirements for Flock or who, for whatever reason, don’t want to download and install Flock. Once you have had a few successful singing sessions with your Mac group, only then setup the Zoom bridge in which audio from Flock gets routed to Zoom. The videos on the home page describe how to do this. There is 3rd-party software needed for this step which costs approx $100 so you’ll want to make sure that step 1 is working correctly before setting this up.
Once you have setup the Zoom bridge, the best way to manage a session is to have all singers join first on Zoom so that everyone can see each other. And then the Mac singers who are setup for Flock disconnect their Zoom audio (easy to do… there are instructions both in the videos and on the forum) and then connect to the Flock room. Then remember to mute everyone on Zoom during the singing. That way it feels like one connected group in which everyone can see each other on Zoom (albeit with video delay) while hearing the singers on Flock (without delay). Folks on Zoom can sing along while they are on mute, but everyone will hear only the singers who are connected on Flock.
What about all the Windows and ASIO comments on the forum?
We previously had a Windows test version of Flock which is why there are a lot of posts from a number of months ago on the forum about troubleshooting and testing of the Windows version of Flock. In fact, almost all of the “it’s not working, please help” posts on the forum relate to the Windows version and something called ASIO - please ignore all those posts. It relates to test software that has been discontinued. After much experimentation and many attempts with a software version for Windows, we found that by far the best way to setup non-Mac users (i.e. Windows, iOS, Android, etc) is using the Zoom bridge described above.
Happy singing!