Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Sorry Teamspeak, but you lost me already. Back about 7 years ago when I spent more time online with friends in school, we tried to use Teamspeak multiple times, but the audio quality was always awful. We didn't like Skype either, but the audio was still better, so we dealt with the bloat. Discord is king in my mind, without question. Being electron based makes it a bit heavy, but I can spare 200MB on my machine for some damn good chat and call.

View on HN

You probably had the audio codec configured improperly. Back then, TS used Speex in different bitrates. Today it is OPUS Voice (or OPUS Music), which has absolutely great audio quality. Combine this with very low latency if the server is in your proximity and you've got something that sounds and performs better than anything else - Slack, Discord, etc.

"Damn good" chat might be true, but call? Only if you appreciate mediocre voice quality, a suboptimal RTC protocol and a good big chunk of latency.

Discord feels sluggish, bloated and heavy compared to TS, and it's not just because it's Electron-based.

Not at my PC to check ATM but I'm pretty sure Discord uses Opus codecs as well.

Yeah, but on top of WebRTC = choppy, packet loss

Could've just been a network issue, or simply because it was 7 years ago. I've been using Teamspeak daily with my friends for 6 years, hosted on a 5$ digitalocean droplet and the audio is far superior compared to anything else.

Discord is pretty sweet too, with screensharing, videos, better chat etc. But once more than 2 people talk at once in a channel, even with Nitro/whatever, it starts cutting people up. We can really feel the difference when going back to TS after a Discord call.

TeamSpeak supports Opus and I don't remember quality being an issue. I actually distinctly remember Discord's audio being worse than the best TeamSpeak settings when Discord launched and my friends switched over.

I think Teamspeak defaults to a fairly average codec bitrate choice, it's not great but not awful. You can easily change it to be significantly better than what Discord offers though.

And because it's not running in electron TS voice is a lot more stable under packet loss situations.

TS has always had better audio than Discord. Did you change the codecs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com