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Comment by atomical | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone use discord for work?

I have informally with co-workers. But not in any official capacity.

It's like 20x better than every other product out there though. And their new video chat + screen sharing is pretty great. The bandwidth is far higher than any other competitors I've used.

My brother and I were playing 1080p videos on each of our screens and watching the other's, just to test it out. Obviously it wasn't full quality, but it kept the frame rate up and looked presentable at least to 720p.

Weird, I find Discord's audio quality especially to be terrible.

And their lack of scalable monetization leads me worried about its longterm success as a platform - they are adding more cost-intensive features and continuing to try to support it with what is essentially a $5 monthly donation model.

Can you give more explicit examples of the bad audio quality you experience? I'd be happy to forward this onto our native team to look into if there are some concrete things they can look at. Generally 99% of the audio issues we see people experience are due to ISP/peering/DDoS/etc issues, most of which are handled automatically by our servers within a few minutes.

Anecdotal, but direct calls are pretty unusable for me. I'm on the west coast, and when I attempt calls to the east cost, it frequently cuts out. The workaround was just creating a server and using a voice room in it. This had drastically higher call quality. I assume this is ISP/Peering related, but to see such a night and day difference between voice channels and direct calls leads me to believe that there's something that can be done on your end.

Complaints aside, I love the service. Echoing what avree said, long term monetization worries me. I would like to see discord survive, but its story looks similar to Trello right now in terms of monetization.

Ahhhh, thats actually something we're aware of. Currently direct calls run on an entirely separate set of metals vs. everything else (this was mostly to help us test/measure video & screenshare rollout). Unfortunately some providers seem to be having issues with DDoS filtering over-triggering when they see video traffic, which negatively impacts the whole server. Something we're hopefully fixing in the short term!

I've been using voice calls regularly, and it's occasionally been problematic. Yesterday it was behaving as though it had absolutely insane packet loss (occasional robotic sounding fragments would make it through, otherwise the line was dead) without any indication of high jitter or packet loss - I had to resort to stupid workarounds to get it working. Move convo to a server -> change server to Central from West (why can't this be done for regular calls!) -> instantly working perfectly.

FWIW, it generally works pretty well, and overall, Discord is a fantastic product that I'm happy to be using.

FWIW, a serious feature that I would pay you money for right-here-right-now is the ability to multitrack audio. Let me give you many dollars to route each voice to a separate Soundflower channel, so that I can mix them outside of Discord, and I will give you said monies. I'm pretty sure you're even sending unmixed streams down? But I can't get at them!

This probably involves not being Electron (from my own adventures in the area), so I don't hold out much hope, but it keeps Discord from replacing Extremely Expensive And Bad solutions like SkypeTX for me.

Doesn’t Mumble have that feature?

Mumble doesn't, AFAIK, also do video/screenshare. Think of it like a teleconference. (I could be wrong though, it's been a long time.)

The first thing I was thinking is using PulseAudio somehow. It has some bad image issues but its swiss-knife-of-audio-routing chops are undeniably present. It's Linux only though, so probably wouldn't be useful here.

I'm trying to figure out what the actual context in question is, particularly in terms of technical connectivity. Is this being used for remote DJing? Or conferencing? Or an audio recording situation?

If you're prepared to throw money at the situation, it's possible this may be fixable with a simple bespoke solution. I say "possible" because, unfortunately, I just did some digging and found https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453876:

> Unfortunately we don't support multi-channel > 2 nor multiple devices at the moment.

> ...

> Are there any future plans to support these two features? Is this a w3c issue or a Chrome issue?

> ...

> I am quite skeptical about this; I was told this requires a huge change in our WebRTC-side infrastructure, but I am not sure what the current status is.

> The spec indicates getUserMedia can be configured with 'channel count', so I assume this is Chrome issue.

That immediately nukes WebRTC :(

Could make for a fun project. I'm very fascinated with audio handling myself and this sounds interesting, but I'm unsure I'd personally have the skills (or mental stamina/attention span :< ) to be sure I could follow through. I'm also only on a Linux box, which brings up the platform-native problem.

Sorry, just saw this. I need to split audio to mix and level it for stuff like live-streamed podcasts. So, on top of that, I need to pull video.

Honestly, the best answer is probably to continue using multiple Skype instances. Which is gross. But, y'know.

It's fine - you actually saw it, which is cool :) some of my other past replies have gone completely unnoticed

I see. I get the impression this is collaborative podcasting with multiple people that have multiple microphones. (I can't figure out why else you'd need multichannel A+V transport.) FWIW, it does sound like Skype is probably your best bet for the time being (unfortunately). It's simple, it works for everyone, etc.

Occasionally we notice the robotic voices when service has really degraded. But when it's operating normally, it seems like mumble sounds better.

It's also annoying having to adjust each users volume slider individually, I wish Discord would just do that automatically and normalize the levels of everybody.

One thing that I've noticed helps is swapping the region for the server. It doesn't result in any noticeable outage on your server and has resolved any voice quality issues that we've run into most of the time. Usually just swapping between US-Central and US-West in our case.

I briefly thought about whether it would be a better option than Slack. However, Slack seems a little more polished in the areas that we actually use. The subtle, better design in places like the core chat experience aren't worth giving up.

I have used Discord quite a bit for gaming, but it hasn't proved a better option than Slack to me (at least in a work context).

We've debated it internally, but currently have decided to stick with Slack (free version)

I'll need to echo some of the other comments here - at work we're pretty much stuck with Skype for Business (aka "lync") because the voice system ties into it. When I suggested Discord, it was shrugged off because it's "Chat for Gamers" and clearly they're not going to budge from that niche anytime soon, from all the recent features I've seen.

Unofficially, for "out of band" discussions and also for on-call events where we need to collab on stuff.

We're stuck with Skype for official stuff and telephony though.

We did, but due to some people having image issues about using a “gamer tool”, we were forced to switch back to the inferior Slack.

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