Corona Karaoke

Corona is about keeping people physically apart. 

It is also about bringing people together. Neighbors streets away and friends oceans away are now equidistant.  Christmas 2017,  we had a karaoke meet at Richu's home.  That had involved Pravin driving cross country from New York. Now, there is no distance. Everyone has to stay home all the time.



Just finished an online karaoke session with Richu & Gowri, Pravin & Nisha and us. It was good fun. We had a planning call earlier on today on how to set things up, what software to use, how to connect karaoke systems and so on. We did some basic zoom POC tests over other conversations as well. The conclusion was to start with a simple zoom conference, with the laptop showing the three families on screen. Each family would take turns singing, while the others mute their mikes. 

With plans in place, we took a break for Pravin & Nisha to feed kids dinner as they are still in New York, three hours ahead of us and it is already dinner time there. 

Meanwhile, Richu had shared the zoom invite to Rohit,Gopal and Paul in India as well.  It was too early in India for a sunday morning.

So, at 7:30 PM PST,  joined the zoom meeting. We took turns singing as planned. Zoom would typically let you do only a forty minute session for free.  So, when the forty minute session ends, we create another meeting and share that and so on. That plan was working reasonably well. By mistake, at my turn, instead of creating a new meeting, I copied the invite and re-sent the invite.  During the course of the second meeting with the same id, zoom upgraded the meeting time to unlimited, thanks again to Corona time relaxations that social media companies are making. 

We were unable to do sing together as a group as zoom would relay only one audio out at a time. Also, sharing screen and seeing each other together was not working out either.

Today's mission was just to get the ball rolling on online karaokeing. It was a huge success. We were able to sing quite a few songs.  Zoom's forty minute time mandate meant that we were getting into songs quicker. Feels like this is just the beginning.  Creative endeavors are going online. Next up - a short film?


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