Well, actually, many users on the forum I’m on usually converse in external environments, and joining with the microphone open directly can cause ambient noise to interfere with communication. And there’s another bug: even though you click to mute the microphone on the voice page, the microphone is still actually open, and you have to toggle it off and on again to truly close it.
Compared to Jitsi, there are some differences because Jitsi has an interface that lets you choose to mute or unmute your microphone before officially joining the voice chat, but Discourse Voice doesn’t have this. I think this interface largely avoids the issue.
Oh I see. Would those users benefit from PTT? We have basic support for it, but a better PTT experience, on both mobile and desktop, kinda needs a native app, and this is an area we are actively exploring.
Did you happen to have any other guesses? I tried inviting my other demo user and unfortunately it’s still not working. Have you been able to successfully invite users via a link?
Update: I just sent an invitation to a new room to an admin, and they still got a 404 page.
@putty it’s possible this is an issue with your username on the site. The route in your screen recording ends with /invited-by/derek.putnam, and the route for this currently rejects periods in usernames. This should fix it:
You can also test on your site by sharing the linking without the /invited-by/... bit.
We were using this over the weekend to good effect 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, there’s probably few situations the user would actually want a wide field of view to capture audio during a call – 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.
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.