Increase WebRTC Voice Audio Quality & Add Quality Controls
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Rental Rizzler
Since the transition from Vivox to WebRTC, voice quality has noticeably decreased for many users.
WebRTC itself is fully capable of excellent voice quality. I would like to see the current WebRTC/Opus audio configuration revisited.
I would like to see
* A higher default bitrate/audio quality target
* Add a user adjustable voice quality/bitrate setting (Low, Normal, High)
Second Life is a social platform; Why are we treating the one of two socializing options we have in-game as an afterthought.
I understand that increasing bitrate has bandwidth and infrastructure costs, but it is disappointing that moving to a modern WebRTC/Opus resulted in worse perceptual audio quality in exchange for relatively small bandwidth savings.
If bitrate is not the cause of the quality difference, then I would ask that the codec, bandwidth, processing, and other WebRTC audio parameters be reviewed with the goal of matching or exceeding the perceptual quality of the previous Vivox implementation.
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SL Feedback
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SL Feedback
Hello, and thank you for your feature request.
While we really like this suggestion and we do plan to do something like it, we are not going to do it in the proposed fashion. Please keep an eye out for future releases and maybe you’ll see an approach we’ve taken that addresses your concerns.
Incoming suggestions are reviewed in the order they are received by a team of Lindens with diverse areas of expertise. We consider a number of factors: Is this change possible? Will it increase lag? Will it break existing content? Is it likely that the number of residents using this feature will justify the time to develop it? This wiki page further describes the reasoning we use: Feature Requests
We are grateful for the time you took to submit this feature request. We hope that you are not discouraged from submitting others in the future. Many excellent ideas to improve Second Life come from you, our residents. We can’t do it alone.
Thank you for your continued commitment to Second Life.
Stone Lunasea
SL Feedback what is this even supposed to mean? This is about the most generic form letter reply I've ever read. Is this going to be fixed or not? Nobody cares if you actually adjust the bit rate or how you fix it, the point is are you going to fix it? Sorry not trying to be rude, but this reply is no help at all?
Rental Rizzler
SL Feedback No Offense, but you guys have become the most out of touch, and vague team of developers I have ever provided feedback to.
Just be fucking transparent, tell us what you guys plan on doing, tell us why the voice sounds like shit, tell us what you're doing and stop keeping the community in the dark.
I have been nothing but supportive of this game since I joined when I was a teenager on the teen grid. I want to see this game thrive again, and I am so sick of the way you have been handling things.
Tails41347 Resident
I would also agree to this to have the bitrate checked. Ran a little test with music through voice between Vivox and WebRTC, the quality felt almost the same perhaps a tiny bit difference, very unnoticeable. Even if we turn off the noise cancellation, it feels like SL have a way to still cancel noises by it's own and that comes with people fades away in a muffled voice till nothingness from time to time. IT's like we got into WebRTC and we brought the issues with us. Not sure of the muffled is part of some hidden gate control of inputs that we can't control.
Raven Seraph
I also think this is a really important feature that needs to be revisited. The current state of the WebRTC is close to unusable for some. I've got friends who sound crystal clear and perfect on Discord who then are nearly inaudible half the time on SL. The quality varies, fades in and out of static or sounds like they're underwater and I can't understand them at all. I agree with the poster about this being fairly important as SL is a social platform and voice is a big draw for a lot of people who want to hang out and chat.
Stone Lunasea
I was honestly shocked the one and only time I've tried the new WebRTC voice service. I was expecting to be blown away by the quality, as I have been with every single other service that uses WebRTC. I don't know what linden did here, that no one else does, but the quality is absolutely awful. We immediately turned it off and went back to discord.