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Comment by _notathrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Teams is a real clustefuck, I do not believe it is a design decision but rather just poorly written code.

From the outside perspective, this must be true. Recently I have noticed, that Teams, unlike any other app I tried, is unable to properly distinguish between stereo and mic, when that arrives both at the headset jack (made for both, stereo and mic) of my laptop. When I switch in Teams to use that as mic, it means, that others hear themselves and do not hear me. I tried everything, but Teams is simply unable to take the proper mic input from the headset jack, while an app like audacity has no issue at all. Teams is utter garbage. Found topics on MS websites, where people are describing similar problems. The answers usually are: "Well, it is MS, what do you expect?" and no solution in sight. In the year. 2000 and 22. And this is what I am forced to deal with. So I had to go back to only have the output on headset jack and use the laptop internal mic, which very likely has much worse quality than my external on the desk standing microphone, which I am effectively unable to use, because I have to use Teams...

This stuff can drive you crazy. Each month there is some new annoyance or broken part, that I discover.

I've never had your particular issue, but my favorite has got to be that it somehow "loses" the mic between conferences, although the sound server shows it as still recording...

I can understand not detecting something, or badly, but if it works now, and then on the next conference it figures "nah, there's no mic", I just can't understand what it does.

Oh losing the mic has happened to me mid-call many many times. Suddenly I would notice, that someone does not respond to anything I am saying, then check in Teams and, what do you know ... "Your microphone is not working.". I leave call, call again, without changing anything, mic works again ...

I find that usually (but not always...) restarting Teams works. I chalk it up to "made by Microsoft". People make fun of me at work when I ask them if they tried rebooting it whenever they have a problem (the company I work for runs Windows on the desktop, I'm the odd one out running Linux).

I used to think that this was an issue with me running Linux, and an "unsupported" distro at that (Arch). But I'm always reassured (in a way) when I see people having the exact same issues I do on Windows, with basic, run-of-the-mill configs (I have multiple sound cards, some of which come and go).

Teams and audio problems is pervasive. Since a few months I cannot use Teams on the iPhone any more [1] because they changed/broke volume control so that even the lowest possible volume is way too loud (and interestingly, Teams somehow manages to circumvent the hearing protection settings in iOS). The audio quality on iOS is also very jarring, regardless of connection speed, basically to the point of it hurting in the ears even if you reduce the volume to a safe level (e.g. by dangling the headphones in front of your ears instead of putting them in, which is absolutely ridiculous). Similarly I had issues with Teams mute control on a dedicated, certified headset, where both the mute button on the headset and in the Teams UI did nothing, only the special Fn key on the laptop worked. "It magically fixed itself at some point".

[1] I really liked to walk'n'talk for a few recurring meetings. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not like people touching grass.

It also doesn't happen on MacOS where you can see the indicator dot go away after a call. Teams just has a lot of bugs.

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