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Comment by ReidZB | Hacker News Reader

I really wish Discord would implement an audio compressor (or if they use one, make it much more aggressive) for voice chat. For example, Mumble doesn't require manually adjusting anyone's volume - instead, it uses a compressor to automatically normalize volumes for everyone.

In contrast, Discord has a volume slider that I end up having to adjust for most people. That requires manual tweaking, often while I'm playing a game, and isn't future-proof; just the other day, one of my friends changed his microphone setup and was extremely loud (I had him at 200% when in the new setup he should've been at about 75%).

This is really my only complaint with Discord's VOIP functionality. It is a major step backward from Mumble. (Also, for some reason the Discord community mostly uses voice activated mic instead of push-to-talk, but I don't think that's Discord's fault.)

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> voice activated mic

Which is a very sane default for most people

The only reason you'd want to use push to talk is either you have a lot of people in the channel, you have a loud background or you don't want people hearing stuff not designated for the discord voice (if you're streaming, have irl people in the same room - that kinda stuff)

Personally, I hate the sound of people chewing and smacking their lips directly in my ear as they work their way through their 'fresh that afternoon' gas station nachos.

But that's just me :)

if you are in control of the Discord server you can force push to talk in voice channels

It is not just you. I know of several gaming sites that will block or ban people for leaving their mic open or making breathing sounds into it.

Also vaping incessantly...

> "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

> "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

> "I thought you just told me they used radio."

> "They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ

What a haunting short film. (I understand that it's adapted from a short story.)

Tangent: It's ironic that the dialogue between the two aliens is spoken by humans. After all, the actors are rendering the dialog with meat sounds. I think it would have been better to use a speech synthesizer that's not based on actual recordings of meat sounds -- like eSpeak, DECtalk, or ETI-Eloquence. DECtalk, at least, is flexible enough to speak with whatever intonation you want, so the dialogue wouldn't necessarily come out sounding flat.

It's not a sane default for people gaming with mouse/mechanical keyboard. The voice activation can (in general) be set not to have squad breathing and chewing in your ear - but you'll hear every Crack of desperate mouse movement...

It might be better with people using Xbox controllers.

>>It might be better with people using Xbox controllers.

Not necessarily, I have had to disable my mic when playing certain games, apparently I'm violent enough with the analog sticks that hitting the end of travel will activate discord.

My modmic setup doesn't transmit me typing on my Cherry MX Brown keyboard.

And we complain a lot when someone on the server has an improper voice activation threshold, so everyone quickly fixes theirs.

Also rocking a ModMic5 and a keyboard with Brown switches. Never had an issue transmitting when I wasn't actually speaking. Both in Discord and Slack.

>Which is a very sane default for most people

I couldn't disagree more. Having an open mic setup for gaming is both insane and completely inconsiderate to everyone else in the channel/group.

It's hard not to personally judge people that join a group, whether that's a friend of a friend, someone looking to try out, public LFG lobbies, etc and you can immediately tell they have an open mic configuration. It's maddening.

Breathing, keyboard smashing, mouse clicking, background noise, eating, or exasperated whining every time you die/lose are all annoyances you push on the rest of the channel/group with an open mic configuration. At best it's an annoyance. At worst it's actively disrupting people's game play and team communication.

For the love of all that is decent with humanity, use push to talk.

> For the love of all that is decent with humanity, use push to talk.

I’d love Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, et al., to implement push-to-talk, and give an option for mandatory use to conference call organizers.

Zoom does, long press the space bar to talk

I think Zoom now has a preference for holding down space to temporarily unmute your mic. But I fully agree, push-to-talk should be absolutely mandatory for any calls with more than 2 people in them.

Zoom has to have focus which rules out using PTT while presenting or multitasking while meeting.

http://mizage.com/shush/ for anyone on a Mac is a godsend. Emulates a hardware PTT (can be toggled to push to silence) before audio ever gets to applications. Best $5 I've ever spent.

What's so special about this? Discord has PTT and PTS native.

The reply is suggesting it as a solution to the problem for apps other than Discord, which the parent comment mentions.

AFAIK Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, and Mumble each support this

It's definitely common in gaming-focused apps, but not in the general or business focused apps like Skype, Slack, Teams, etc.

We use Teams on our team, and my current PTT technique is to Ctrl+Shift+M to unmute and mute every time. Très annoying.

Not to mention that often the mute button in many of these apps needs to execute hideous amounts of WebRTC-related Javascript in Electron, delaying your mute significantly. Signalling the CoreAudio OS system directly as Shush does is the right layer for the job.

IIRC even Skype has that option. Can you not bind this directly in Windows/macOS?

Skype only has "push to mute."

Open mic and voice activation are two different things. The first is permanent sending of your microphone input, the last one is only sending when there is activity, hence the name.

>Open mic and voice activation are two different things.

In theory but not in practice.

Also in practice. You just need to tell people, and by tell I mean command them to fix their stuff.

"working as intended, just patronize other users into fiddling with their settings until it's acceptable"

sounds to me like it's not a sane default

Sometimes it can be hard to know that your setup isn't working as you expected.

Whilst commanding someone to fix it should be the last resort most people with voice activation would rather the setup work for everyone in the server so they can keep using it.

On my setup for example I had a desk mic which sat on my wooden desk. People had to point out to me that there were sudden sharp noises coming from my mic. Eventually it was isolated to my mouse hitting the desk and vibrating up the base into the mic. I placed the mic on a bit of foam and everyone was happy. These types of activations are not picked up during self testing easily.

People don't hear their microphone, so they won't notice wrong settings. Telling them is the only choice you have. If you think "command" is too strong of a word, use "urge".

Have you played an online game recently? Not exactly the most eager to take advice from strangers, those folk.

You can't command youngsters when you don't have authority over them. Asking it in a friendly tone is much more reasonable though it does require an extra keybind (I recommend rebinding caps lock to it).

Yes. You can if they come to your server. And then they are not exactly strangers anymore. Nobody cares about ingame voice as those are usually PTT per default.

Mumble has a really great voice detection algorithm, so I never hear your parade of horribles.

Not sure if discord has anything as good, that might be the difference.

There are situations where an open mic is useful, such as conference calls and high-intensity multiplayer FPS and MOBA games. Initiating such a group call shoud be as explicit as possible, however.

It’s just ignorance to do this. It’s definitely possible to run an open mic on discord without any of these sounds. Opening your audio settings where you can set the threshold very clearly for what makes it in and what does not.

This falls apart for people that speak very quietly though. If there is no volume difference between your chewing sounds and your speaking sounds you __need__ push to to talk.

Voice activation on teamspeak was much more reasonable and accurate. Discord's is always either trigger happy or drops quiet speech.

Also voice activation is a boon for competitive games where you can't spare a hotkey and finger during play.

Use your foot

https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1qOGOKVXXXXX8XpXXq6xXFXXXZ.jpg

Can confirm. I bought a cheap USB pedal and use it for push to talk, it works great.

I read a story about someone who used a step-to-talk setup for their game comms: the motion was so ingrained that, one day while driving in traffic, they inadvertently floored the gas pedal while having a conversation with a passenger.

I don't think they hit anyone, but they did unplug the foot pedals from their PC the moment they got home.

When using pedal based PTT in the field, I would put the PTT pedal backwards and use my heel to develop different 'muscle memory' in relation to driving, etc.

Worked great!

>Also voice activation is a boon for competitive games where you can't spare a hotkey and finger during play.

I've been playing competitive games for 15 years. I think you're overstating how difficult it is to press one other button. It's also contradictory to the common practice of clans/scrim groups having a PTT policy.

I think people saying "Well X does it better." are missing the point. It's always been a problem. Ventrilo, Mumble, Teamspeak, etc. If you've never considered it a problem there is a good possibility a lot of people around you were just tolerating it.

From my ~10y experience with multiplayer games voice activation IS clearly superior. Not sure what games are you talking about (and what's "competitive" level for you), but there was never enough keys for in-game actions and scripts, PTT is shooting yourself into the foot just because you can't find not-infantile teamplayers

>voice activation IS clearly superior.

Why? That's just a bald assertion with a butt load of evidence to the contrary.

>and what's "competitive" level for you

I'm pretty serious about competitive play. Started with CS 1.6, moved to SC2, then RB6:Siege, then GO, and now OW. I've consistently ranked in the top tier in each of those games. I moved my gym time to my lunch break and run when I wake up so I can play games in the evening and scrim when I'm on teams. It's an addiction.

>PTT is shooting yourself into the foot just because you can't find not-infantile teamplayers

I like how instead of addressing the technological merits of voice activation you just call people "infantile" to avoid actually discussing the subject.

> For the love of all that is decent with humanity, use push to talk.

This is super game/group dependent. For example if I'm playing with a 5 stack I'll have open mic on volume cutoff. We're casually chatting pre-game and ptt is not useful there, then dota starts and I cannot manage the additional load of regularly using ptt key whilst playing so I'll end up talking way less and it's bad

On the other hand in a 250 man fleet in Eve Online - you'd best believe everyone with open mic is getting banned from the server.

Can Discord server admins enforce PTT? I believe on Teamspeak there was a setting the disabled voice activation for that server.

The joy of hearing sick people coughing or sneezing. Or raging people. Or their family. Their barking dogs.

The best being when they use speakers so you get some echo. That's usually when they get muted because fuck their lazy-ass.

Absolutely not, the default should be PTT.

I can't tell you how many times I've ran into users who just cannot get their sensitivity right. So in turn, you end up with a ton of people coughing, sneezing, talking to others, fans, and insert your other favorite background noise. Most users just don't care to set it up right, and it's impossible to get them to adjust it (unless you have some type of Discord Mod / Admin privs on the server at the time to force them to fix it). Otherwise, you have a bunch of users who have to put up with Joe-Schmoe chewing away on his mic.

It's why the Discord servers I'm in 100% completely enforce PTT, zero voice activation allowed.

Hi, I'd like to introduce you to the very large gaming crossover niche of mechanical keyboards.

What were you saying about open mics?

    you have a lot of people in the channel

Which is common

    you have a loud background

Which is also extremely common. Fans, open windows, keyboard, neighbors yelling, etc.

     you don't want people hearing stuff not designated for the

Like the fact you're a goddamn mouth breather. Fuck I refuse to join most discords because most the time I have to hear people mouth breath into their mics.

I think you outlined several major reasons to use push to talk. I exclusively use push to talk, specifically so I am not that guy in raid with an open mic, breathing heavy, with police sirens wailing in the background.

> Also, for some reason the Discord community mostly uses voice activated mic instead of push-to-talk, but I don't think that's Discord's fault.

Definitely the community, as Discord provides an option to require PTT on a channel-by-channel basis.

Not sure if this is the case here, but the chosen defaults and the UX around it could easily make it a Discord's fault.

IMO it would be significantly more user-hostile to disallow users choosing whether to use PTT unless the benevolent server owner allows it.

I know people who consider voice-activation to be an accessibility feature, as otherwise it would be too difficult/distracting to be able to use VOIP.

A community should absolutely be able to disallow voice-activation, but disallowing it by default across the platform would be an issue.

No, I'm speaking more about hiding voice-activation mode somewhere into accessibility settings page, as opposed to getting big shiny button "activate voice-activation" after first login or even enabling it by default with an option to switch to PTT afterwards.

I wonder if the difference in PTT vs voice activated has to do with the common games being played at the time.

PTT is mandatory running an MMORPG raid with 40 people. Voice activated is perfect for playing a game while talking with 3-8 people at a time.

I think that's exactly it, as well as the comparative twitchiness of the game. You don't have time to fiddle with an extra button in something like Overwatch while you can probably exchange a couple of emails and check twitter during a single FF14 GCD.

Even for Overwatch in a group with 2-3 friends I’d much rather have them use PTT because a lot of people are keyboard-smashing typists who can’t set the mic transmit threshold right.

How can so many people be complaining about keyboard sounds?! I assume they ain't using a mechanical keyboard, and/or they ain't using a laptop with built-in mic, but a headset.

In Overwatch, we can set the input/output volume but no threshold and my mic doesn't have that option.

That's why I also use PTT.

Eh we raided Mythics with 25 where most people had voice activation. Was perfectly fine.

I think it's more about who you're playing with, if you are good friends with the people that you are on voice with, chances are you're quite alike and considerate to each other.

Wouldn't the sheer overlap of sounds of people mashing on their keyboards drive you insane? I'm usually fine with voice activation in a smaller group (like maybe 5 people) but once you get up to 25 people, I feel like the background noise could seriously overpower some really important callouts that one might need to hear (in the context of something like Mythic raiding).

>Wouldn't the sheer overlap of sounds of people mashing on their keyboards drive you insane?

That's a hint that the voice activation level is not configured correctly.

No level of voice activation can work well with Cherry Blues

Yes, yes it can.

It never did for me. I have a Blue Yeti set to cardioid, and the levels needed to fully ignore my mx blues also sometimes ignored my voice.

Mumble offers signal to noise detection that can be more effective than amplitude detection in many but not all situations. I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more widely.

Edited for tone.

Do you have a pop filter or a foam head? That will help.

How close is the Blue Yeti to your face (and to the keyboard)? You might be able to do better with a headset.

This is not high enough. Spending a few minutes setting voice activation is critical, and can go a long way toward helping with issues people have with voice activation. Background sounds should not trigger voice. Typing should not trigger voice. The issues is many people don't do this, and so make the assumption that voice activation is bad.

Couple that with people not being considerate of others (such as not muting when you do need to make noise that will be picked up), it gives voice activation a bad rap.

But in terms of pure quality, voice activation is always, in my mind, better than PTT. Granted, the last few years I've only really ever played with friends and in small groups, so when people forget, we aren't righteous assholes about it.

Background sounds should not trigger voice. Typing should not trigger voice.

That's right. Voice activity detection (VAD) is not the same as sound detection. WebRTC even has a really good VAD built into it that is extremely easy to use and dynamically adapts to the current audio environment. See e.g. https://github.com/wiseman/py-webrtcvad and https://github.com/dpirch/libfvad for examples where the relatively small VAD code has been pulled out of the giant webrtc corpus.

People also need to know to enable AEC in their audio driver, which completely solves the problem of whatever sounds they're playing leaking into their mic.

I'd rather slit my wrists than have to herd a raid team any more than I already have to by micromanaging their voice settings. PTT or mute.

Voice activation levels are set by the person themselves. You don't manage someone's for them, you can change someone else's volume.

And who makes them change it? I would have to micromanage every single person into setting their voice activation right.

Yeah, once. If you can't even be bothered to do that, raid leading (hell, even just raiding) isn't for you. There's a lot more frustration to come.

Been doing it for a couple of years. It's not as simple as you think to deal with something like this. If you think it's a once and done deal, you've obviously never had to deal with stuff like this in a group of more than 5 people.

It is. Don't extrapolate your experience to a broader set.

It isn’t. Setups change. Stuff gets uninstalled and reinstalled. Old members leave, new ones join. Environments change. Fiddling with that shit isn’t worth the effort and it’s a complete waste of time when a perfect solution exists.

I used TeamSpeak for a long time but when my group switched to Discord there have been a litany of audio problems. My favorite is people will complain about an intermittent hiss that only stops when I talk. The hiss ends even after I've finished transmitting, and I'm not transmitting the hiss (it happens even when I'm not connected to the audio chat.)

I don't find this to be the case. I have played several games on several servers, including 40 and 50 person channels, and I have never manually adjusted volume. The only adjustment I make is to mute myself so everyone else can't hear me yell at football.

should be doable with https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DynamicsCom...

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