Voice: Discord-style voice and video rooms, now bundled with Discourse ๐ŸŽ™

We were using this over the weekend to good effect :slight_smile: One bug / unexpected feature we found is that the system supports stereo mics. Normally, on web conferencing software, the left channel and right channel are downmixed to mono since mono mic hardware are typically used for capturing this sort of audio. (This also theoretically reduces bandwidth usage). The Discourse solution currently transmits full stereo mics.

However, some mics will only output to one channel and leave the other empty. (Maybe this is just more typical for prosumer audio interfaces that have multiple inputs, but I imagine some cheap mics might end up doing this, too). This results in the listeners only hearing that speaker in the left or right ear. I actually did not realize this, but apparently Mumble, discord, nextcloud, jitsi, games, etc all downmix to mono.

So, I would recommend defaulting to downmix the mic audio stream (not the screenshare audio stream which should be a separate set of channels) to mono. Generally speaking, thereโ€™s probably few situations the user would actually want a wide field of view to capture audio during a call โ€“ maybe if a music band was using it to stream to their fans, perhaps. In that case, if the user specifically has and wants to use a wide-field stereo mic, let them enable it via settings which would turn off the mono downmixing.

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