Here's Why Zoom Beats Skype for Music Lessons

Despite my former site (Clarion Clavier) previously having references to Skype all over the place, I wanted to explain my reasoning behind my decision to switch to Zoom for hosting my online piano lessons. 

I first started teaching piano lessons online via Skype back in 2017. I ended up making the switch from Skype to Zoom in 2020, after Zoom added several important audio features. I have been using Zoom successfully to this date, and my students very much enjoy their lessons using Zoom. 

Transitioning from Skype to Zoom

Originally, I had appreciated Skype's clear 1080p picture and easy to use features over Zoom's more intimidating and customizable interface. However, there are many features that Zoom supports that Skype does not. Additionally, Skype has a few negatives that must be considered. 

Moving from Skype to Zoom was a significant decision for my studio, primarily because I require all my students to use the same platform. Although many teachers are willing to use whatever platform the student requires, I find that context switching between lessons wastes time and makes me less efficient. My current audio setup also requires Zoom over Skype, so there’s that. 

I wanted to share my reasoning why I made the switch from Skype to Zoom. This was originally inspired by issues that I had with Skype, but I eventually came to appreciate what Zoom offers over Skype, especially as it relates to audio. 

The Downsides of Skype

The most obvious issue I had with using Skype is that the level of audio control was extremely limited. Skype does a fair bit of compressing and audio enhancement, which typically would make the user experience more pleasant and reliable under normal conditions. 

However, in the situation of online piano lessons, Skype's audio processing sometimes caused major issues with no obvious resolution. This included the audio randomly cutting out whenever the student played their piano, especially if the student was using an iPad. 

There were also incidents where students reported to me that my piano was coming through completely distorted while my voice sounded completely normal. It was actually this particular situation that forced me to start using Zoom as a necessary alternative. 

Zoom Features

While I was using and advocating for Skype, I was always aware that Zoom had more features and customizability. I continued to use Skype regardless because of the image quality and convenience of having a mechanism to chat with students and call them with the same interface. 

Once started using Zoom, I noticed that many of the features I had previously written off turned out to be quite helpful. This included being able to screen share wirelessly from my iPad, which allowed me to share my sheet music from ForScore and annotate it in real time for students. 

However, the most important and amazing feature of Zoom over Skype is the ability to have amazing sound quality in real time. I say "ability" because Zoom doesn't work this way by default. You have to manually enable various settings, which I will touch on below. 

The most obvious audio enhancements are high fidelity music mode, removal of echo cancellation, and stereo audio, in addition to being able to disable the other audio processing options. To learn more about these options, or to learn how to optimize your Zoom client for music lessons, click the button below.

Optimizing Zoom for Audio

Working with Zoom's Downsides

Out of the box, with no modifications, I will admit that Skype sounds better than Zoom, and it looks better too. This is why I went with Skype for so many years. However, the audio enhancements make it easily the best sounding calling client that I have heard. Because Zoom supports stereo audio, among other things, I do prefer Zoom over Rock Out Loud Live. 

The obvious downside of Zoom is that every student must carefully ensure they have the correct audio settings enabled. If they are using an iPad, they may have to re-enable original sound for every call. Other downsides are the fact that Zoom is inherently more complicated to use, and it doesn’t work as an instant messenger for folks outside of the call (a very convenient feature of Skype). 

Another downside is that Zoom appears to require a better connection than Skype, especially if using the high fidelity audio mode. In my experience, I find that if a student’s connection is good in Zoom, it is good in Skype. If it is bad in Zoom, it is barely adequate in Skype. In this situation, I would rather insist that a student deal with connection issues, as opposed to switching to Skype. This is my opinion, however. 

Overall, I feel Zoom sounds much better, and is much more reliable, and gives you many more tools to address audio issues when compared to Skype. Additionally, it comes across as more professional, and is easier to onboard students with because they just need a link as opposed to a Microsoft account. 

Now that I have been using Zoom exclusively for a while, I can strongly recommend it as the video calling platform of choice for online lessons.