Using My Powerbook As A Hearing Aid

(this is from a mymac staff email thread. the experiment was also tried on two other macs as well, a fairly new imac and an old mac color classic. none of them work for this without some serious work-arounds or specific software, and none of them work well enough to help someone who is genuinely hard-of-hearing.)

to mymac staff,
hear [sic] is the deal – sometimes wearing a hearing aid is a pain in the butt [sic]. the hearing aid sticks in my ear canal, and it stays there for hours at a time. some relief from it would be nice.

in fact, it would be so nice to plug in a microphone to my ever-present powerbook, while i am wearing these really cool, small, loud and very comfortable on-the-ear headphones. i already use these phillips ($20) headphones constantly, to listen to my songs and audiobooks that play on the itunes application on my laptop.

(note: while the ipod in-the-ear headphones are excellent headphones, i avoid them for the same reason i have come to hate wearing my in-the-ear hearing aid.)

to me, all that is missing, in order to use my powerbook for a hearing aid, is some sort of software that can connect the built-in microphone to my headphones on the powerbook, so that a person may listen to live feed through the headphones.

does anyone know of a piece of code, or a script, or a piece of software (free or for-a-price) that can let me do this?

i already know that the ipod is not a good candidate for using as a hearing aid , unless it is the mac ipod touch (or the iphone), because the ipod volume is already too low to hear my music. (therefore i have been using my ipod nano to store stuff, since i cannot hear my itunes on it. – yeah, i listen to my itunes on my powerbook instead, using those headphones i just mentioned).

any thoughts on this one? (definitely off-the-wall) thanks in advance, oh great-ones-of-mymac.com

roger-the-deaf

ps
happy easter to you guys. i happened to guest-preach the sunday morning sermon today at our little congregation here in barstow. thirty-one years ago, my wife was in the audience when i guest-preached in a congregation in huntington beach. she was there when i did the same thing a few hours later at a convalescent home, and again that sunday night. i did not know her then, but she soon let me know that it was hearing me that day that made her decide that we should get to know each other better. tuesday is our 30th wedding anniversary. yeah, we were both young and single back then. weird the time go? she is still just my awesome, beautiful and wonderful mate. (yeah, i know – i am the luckiest [most blessed] man on the planet, for some reason.) -rog

Roger,
I’m uncertain about what you are trying to accomplish. You want to listen to a microphone connected to your mac through the headphones? That is no trick. Do you mean you want to hear the live feed of a microphone over the web?
Chris

chris,
no. no live feed online. i just need to be able to listen to what is around me on the powerbook, live, like a hearing aid. if the mic is directional, so much the better. but the internal mic should pick up anything, right? i would just like to use it to watch tv in my den, where i spend most of my time (being on chemo, and all). i have captioning on the television, but i know some of the movies i watch has great music and sound-effects. i know i can use my hearing aid, but not unless i really crank up the volume on the television. my neighbors complain when i do that. =)

you say it is no trick, but i have not been able to access the live mic on my powerbook, through my headphones yet. you would think this would not be that hard to do. apple should have already planned for this, knowing how many of their customers are getting to be hard-of-hearing. thanks again for any input.
-roger

Roger
Following this with interest. I’m still in the resisting-the-hearing-aid stage, but maybe all I need is a new laptop.
John

Roger,
Try Audio Hijack Pro. You should be able to take the internal mic feed from the laptop and redirect it to the headphones with that – and you can process the audio on the way (increased volume etc.). Just don’t turn it on without the headphones connected. The feedback will be extremely unpleasant.
David.

Rog:
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I can relate to your soon to be 30th Wedding anniversary. We are on 21 and counting—Congrats…
Rich

Roger
You can do it in GarageBand. Select input to whatever mic you need, and then turn on Monitor with Feedback protection.
Tim

tim,
its interesting that in GB and in QT, the sound levels never get as high as they do in iTunes. I can use iTunes to listen to my music on my powerbook, but even with these great headphones, I cannot clearly hear whatever is playing in GB or QT. odd.

I knew the sound in QT was always low, but I thought that it was a particular movie I was playing. i am beginning to see that the volume in quicktime is a real issue here. sumbuddy ought to blog this one.

I will look online to see if there are any fixes or upgrades for this problem with the volume. perhaps i will blog it too, once i figure out if there are any other deaf/hard-of-hearing mac users out there.

thanks for the input. i will download the demo of Audio HiJack too, to see. it is not too expensive if it works – $40.
-roger

Sure Roger, this is no problem, you can do this with audio midi setup (and also turn up the output for bonus points). It is built right into OS X (use spotlight to find it easily). There you should be able to click the thru box and have the sound from the microphone play through to the earphones. For some reason this works for me in Tiger and not leopard. I’m guessing it is because I have some other stuff installed (sunflower, free at sourceforge) that will do the same trick.
Chris

chris,
so far, nada. cannot hear output from internal mic, no matter how i try to use the audio midi setup. guess it will take another app to make it so i can hear what comes over the mic. unless it is not loud enough for me to hear anything, being mostly deaf as i am.
thanks, roger

Roger,
you using leopard or tiger? Built in or external microphone? Give me specifics and I’ll try to recreate your situation and find the solution.
Thanks, Chris

chris,
built-in mic on my powerbook – probably locked out to stop feedback. tiger 10.4.11 is my os. the mic on my G4 800 MHz powerbook is just above the left internal speaker. the sound utility shows the mic is on and working. all sound controls are already dialed to 11. =)
thanks,
roger

staff,
FWIW, neither audio midi setup nor audio hijack pro seem to offer PLAY THRU, which is likely what i need to have the headphones allow me to hear the built-in mic. still looking for SUNFLOWER.
-rog

Chris Seibold to staff
you’ll look a long time for sunflower, I meant soundflower, sorry.

Roger,
Do you have GarageBand?
Tim

tim,
yeah. haven’t used it that much. hard to hear the tracks.
-rog

Roger,
Yeah, that’s not why you want to try this. Set up a new “podcast” session. Select the first Male Audio track and click the record button in the track. (NOT the big red record button at the bottom.) Then set these settings. That will allow you to hear the Microphone.
Tim

tim,
thank you. got it to work. still almost too soft for me to hear. i guess a deaf guy should not be trying to do this. sorry.
-roger

to staff,
i have noted a slight (half-second) delay in what comes out of the headphones when the mic is on in GB. interesting. i know it is because it all goes through the processor and is not live. i just need an extension to GB that allows me to dial the volume to eleven. this is great stuff here.
thanks.
rog

to staff,
on another note about garage band, my raging menace menu meters in my menu bar shows GB using almost 80% of my CPU almost continually. itunes never uses that much, nor does word, photoshop, etc. i guess sound manipulation on a computer does take a lot of processing power.
-rog

Roger!
You *must* wrrite about this crucial topic, once you get it working. Thanks in advance, and to everyone who is assisting, especially long-lost “Sunflower” Siebold.
Nemo

john,
will do. thanks. still working on this whole thing. i think i will blog it instead of doing a feature, since i am not reviewing any software per se.

i can hear a bit better on garage band with a usb microphone, but not by much, and not enough to do it well.

the best set-up i have found so far is to hook my small radio shack 10 watt audio switcher/radio amplifier to the headphone jack on the powerbook. from that, i can use my headphones (with a quarter-inch jack) on the radio shack unit and crank up the volume enough to hear the trucks out on the freeway, a mile away. the sound from the television, however, even though it is cranked up, still sounds muddy. go figure.

oh well, onward! soundflower is next. wish me luck.
roger

gang,
ok. soundflower is great for connecting my internal microphone to my internal speakers or my headphones. that is a done deal, and it answered my original question. thanks. (caveat: soundflower will hijack all your other sound settings in any other app, even after it is turned off. also, soundflower will NOT make your QT or GB play any louder than they do already.)

however, the volume through soundflower is not loud enough to hear things around me like i can with this simple behind-the-ear hearing aid (american made starkey – $600 new)

i am coming to the conclusion that the only setup that will allow me to use my powerbook as a hearing aid (to free me from the pain of constantly wearing my real aid) – is to keep my powerbook hooked into my radio shack amplifier. this is not an elegant solution.

nor can i use my apple ipod touch, since it does not have a built-in mic. the sound output is certainly good enough, in my opinion, using it to listen to my music. however, the sound from the touch does not come out as clear as from my trusty old powerbook.

right now, i can use my powerbook to listen to my itunes collection, but not to watch a DVD, or anything on the web, because the sound level from those are just not loud enough for me to hear what is being said.

this is a frustrating thing, given that there so many good and interesting things to watch and hear on the web. i cannot even hear the sound on the new ironman trailer.

try as i might, i still have not found a reason nor a solution for why quicktime or safari has such low sound output on this powerbook. i do not know if it is because i am on this older model powerbook, or because these apps are just degrading the sound output to protect the ears of its listeners. i do wish apple would fix this. there isn’t much out there on threads or blogs on this subject except people like me asking for the same solutions.

i also have come to appreciate my hearing aid a lot more lately. yeah, it is a pain to have that molded piece of lexan in my ear canal continually, but it does work so well, and so much better than anything else. when it is on, my hearing is almost normal, like glasses that give you 20-20 vision again.

the reason that the hearing aid works better than anything else is because the sound is channeled directly into the ear canal just millimeters from the eardrum. the sound output on the hearing aid is very small, so there is no damage to a person’s auditory nerves. but the directed sound is loud enough to work and work well.

what i am trying to do with my powerbook or any other device, will always be of lesser sound quality because first of all, my headphones do not go in my ears, but on the outside of them. as unpleasant as it is to wear a hearing aid for long periods of time, wearing in-the-ear earbuds, like those that come with the ipod, are that much more unpleasant, because they were not shaped to fit my ears.

i guess my next question would naturally be, could an apple iphone with a built-in mic, be made to play the sounds around me into my head phone?

first, could i even hear anything on the iphone if i used an on-the-ear set of headphones instead of the earbuds that come with it?

second, will the volume on the iphone be as loud as it is on my apple ipod touch? (yes, i can hear my itunes music on the touch, using the on-the-ear headphones).

third, is there an easy way to connect the built-in mic on the iphone directly to the headphones?

fourth, can i afford to buy the iphone just to see if this all works? too bad the apple ipod touch does not have a built-in mic. the nearest apple store is a hundred miles away, but i may try out an iphone with my own headphones the next time i am there, to see if it plays anything loud enough, or if i can access the built-in mic somehow, while i am there. (of course all this may change with the new models coming out soon.)

perhaps i need to also look around to see if there is an small external mic that could be bought for my ipod touch, but that already seems to be a kludge-fix having to use a touch dongle.

i hope this little odyssey of mine has helped any reader here who also wears a hearing aid.

the point i got from all this is that apple is great at what it does, but there must not be any deaf or hard-of-hearing engineers in cupertino. someone tell apple about this. you see, the rest of us are on our own out here, trying to make some audio thing work on our macs, when it would be so easy for apple to include certain features or hardware connections to make all us deaf/hard-of-hearing customers feel welcome.

as an aside, apple seems not to have planned to do much of anything with audio on the mac. already they have given microsoft the lead by default, and ms has run with it, as you can see -and hear- with their excellent SYNC voice activated software interface for ford vehicles. what gives with this? apple practically invented the use of voice activation and text-to-speech on the mac, way back in the 1980s. when and why did they give that up?

regards,
roger
‘’sorry, no refunds’’
your mileage may vary.
film at 11.

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