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Voice Chat help


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I am having a problem using voice chat. My voice cuts in and out over and over again and it makes it unbearable for people to want to talk to me. I'm using the updated version of Firestorm. I am on wireless internet which might be part of the reason, but I do not think it would cause this all by itself. It isn't my microphone because I talk to SL friends through skype now. But it is getting annoying trying to make everyone around me download skype and get there names everytime I want to talk on voice.

I looked around through google for fixes. Haven't found anything helpful. I'd appreciatte any help I got.

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More than likely it's the connection you have to the voice server through your ISP.  Voice is provided by a contractor named Vioxx and goes through their servers rather than LL's.  Try connecting to you internet router using a cable.  It should be a lot better.  Using Skype at the same time as SL voice may also be a problem for you, as Drake pointed out.

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Viewers rarely differ much, if at all, in their particular version of SLvoice / Vivox, so I wouldn’t consider this your most promising solution. As for your better Skype experience, it doesn’t prove your connection blameless, only that it’s a far smarter voice program: it constantly monitors your available bandwidth and dynamically adjusts the audio quality to it, so that if your wireless signal weakens the sound may turn muffled and even a bit distorted but otherwise still runs through in real-time or, sometimes, with a slightly increased delay; and even if it goes below minimum for a second of two, it may interrupt the call but often reestablish it automatically when bandwidth increases again. SLvoice / Vivox, on the other hand, is far less flexible: it demands a fixed quality so, if your bandwidth can’t cope, the call will “stutter”, go into awry sound loops, or simply turn silent; and if it finally is interrupted, it will not be automatically reestablished.

 

Admitting that taking all those around you to Skype (or, for that matter, convincing Linden Lab to switch to a better voice service) isn’t practical, you must try fixing things on your end, managing your connection as best as possible:

  1. Check your wireless router’s settings, specifically wireless protocol (b, g, n, ac...), channel, frequency, strength, etc., all of which affect how usable the signal your laptop gets. A good enough router should automatically manage the best settings, or at least have them on by default, but you never know.
  2. Use your laptop as close and with as few physical separations (walls, etc.) to your router as possible, since these are also factors affecting signal quality.
  3. Check that no other program currently running on your laptop is using any significant part of the bandwidth. E-mail is fine, text chat is fine, even browsing is fine as long as it’s not heavy-duty contents like YouTube; P2P file sharing programs such as eMule or Torrent are not fine; updating routines such as your antivirus’ or operative system’s may hog your bandwidth for a short while, but they don’t usually so long that you’d wish to turn them off.
  4. More indirectly, processor-heavy programs running on your laptop may also affect the stability of your SL voice; even with bandwidth to spare the audio still has to be processed before being sent, and if your processor is already very busy, it’ll choke on the task. So, no high-priority full-computer virus scans, no running Photoshop or other heavy-rendering 3D programs, etc.
  5. Keep also in mind that SL itself is a processor-heavy program, even if it unloads a good deal to the graphics card; if you have the graphics quality amped up to the max, making your framerate rather slow, chances are the voice processing is going to stutter. Therefore, and at least when you want to use voice, try lowering a bit the graphics quality... or if, at that moment you don’t need to keep an eye on what’s happening in front of you, train your camera on the floor, damn close as if to examine an ant; this will greatly reduce what the viewer needs to render in real-time, freeing the processor to perform the voice task more fluidly.
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