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Discord Postmortem from Friday

status.discordapp.com

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Re: Discord Postmortem from Friday

#41

Post by exikyut »

eropple wrote: post #27
b1naryth1ef wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give more explicit examples of the bad audio quality you experience? I'd be happy to forward this onto our native team to look into if there are some concrete things they can look at. Generally 99% of the audio issues we see people experience are due to ISP/peering/DDoS/etc issues, most of which are handled automatically by our servers within a few minutes.

FWIW, a serious feature that I would pay you money for right-here-right-now is the ability to multitrack audio. Let me give you many dollars to route each voice to a separate Soundflower channel, so that I can mix them outside of Discord, and I will give you said monies. I'm pretty sure you're even sending unmixed streams down? But I can't get at them! This probably involves not being Electron (from my own adventures…

The first thing I was thinking is using PulseAudio somehow. It has some bad image issues but its swiss-knife-of-audio-routing chops are undeniably present. It's Linux only though, so probably wouldn't be useful here.

I'm trying to figure out what the actual context in question is, particularly in terms of technical connectivity. Is this being used for remote DJing? Or conferencing? Or an audio recording situation?

If you're prepared to throw money at the situation, it's possible this may be fixable with a simple bespoke solution. I say "possible" because, unfortunately, I just did some digging and found https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453876:

> Unfortunately we don't support multi-channel > 2 nor multiple devices at the moment.

> ...

> Are there any future plans to support these two features? Is this a w3c issue or a Chrome issue?

> ...

> I am quite skeptical about this; I was told this requires a huge change in our WebRTC-side infrastructure, but I am not sure what the current status is.

> The spec indicates getUserMedia can be configured with 'channel count', so I assume this is Chrome issue.

That immediately nukes WebRTC :(

Could make for a fun project. I'm very fascinated with audio handling myself and this sounds interesting, but I'm unsure I'd personally have the skills (or mental stamina/attention span :< ) to be sure I could follow through. I'm also only on a Linux box, which brings up the platform-native problem.

Re: Discord Postmortem from Friday

#42

Post by eropple »

exikyut wrote: post #41
eropple wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, a serious feature that I would pay you money for right-here-right-now is the ability to multitrack audio. Let me give you many dollars to route each voice to a separate Soundflower channel, so that I can mix them outside of Discord, and I will give you said monies. I'm pretty sure you're even sending unmixed streams down? But I can't get at them! This probably involves not being Electron (from my own adventures…

The first thing I was thinking is using PulseAudio somehow. It has some bad image issues but its swiss-knife-of-audio-routing chops are undeniably present. It's Linux only though, so probably wouldn't be useful here. I'm trying to figure out what the actual context in question is, particularly in terms of technical connectivity. Is this being used for remote DJing? Or conferencing? Or an audio recording situation? If…

Sorry, just saw this. I need to split audio to mix and level it for stuff like live-streamed podcasts. So, on top of that, I need to pull video.

Honestly, the best answer is probably to continue using multiple Skype instances. Which is gross. But, y'know.

Re: Discord Postmortem from Friday

#43

Post by lightedman »

exikyut wrote: post #40
lightedman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't look in the ToS. You look in the company articles of incorporation or bylaws which will explain things like how money is allowed to be made.

How would that work? If a company drafts ToS and then plumb violates them, well, it'll be found out eventually and then you get things like the recent debacle with telco data being sold ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286 ), and then the company(s) in question will either get completely shredded or their reputation will at least be seriously besmirched. I can see the logic of what you're saying, but at th…

As soon as you start your own business, you'll know all of this. The short gist of it is when you incorporate, you have to publish rules that govern your entire operation. These are either your articles of incorporation or your bylaws, depending upon the type of entity you are.

If "Don't sell customer data, even surreptitiously" isn't in those bylaws or articles, then the company is free and clear to do that. ToS says how you can use THEIR service externally, not how they internally operate.

Re: Discord Postmortem from Friday

#44

Post by exikyut »

eropple wrote: post #42
exikyut wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing I was thinking is using PulseAudio somehow. It has some bad image issues but its swiss-knife-of-audio-routing chops are undeniably present. It's Linux only though, so probably wouldn't be useful here. I'm trying to figure out what the actual context in question is, particularly in terms of technical connectivity. Is this being used for remote DJing? Or conferencing? Or an audio recording situation? If…

Sorry, just saw this. I need to split audio to mix and level it for stuff like live-streamed podcasts. So, on top of that, I need to pull video. Honestly, the best answer is probably to continue using multiple Skype instances. Which is gross. But, y'know.

It's fine - you actually saw it, which is cool :) some of my other past replies have gone completely unnoticed

I see. I get the impression this is collaborative podcasting with multiple people that have multiple microphones. (I can't figure out why else you'd need multichannel A+V transport.) FWIW, it does sound like Skype is probably your best bet for the time being (unfortunately). It's simple, it works for everyone, etc.

Re: Discord Postmortem from Friday

#45

Post by exikyut »

lightedman wrote: post #43
exikyut wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that work? If a company drafts ToS and then plumb violates them, well, it'll be found out eventually and then you get things like the recent debacle with telco data being sold ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477286 ), and then the company(s) in question will either get completely shredded or their reputation will at least be seriously besmirched. I can see the logic of what you're saying, but at th…

As soon as you start your own business, you'll know all of this. The short gist of it is when you incorporate, you have to publish rules that govern your entire operation. These are either your articles of incorporation or your bylaws, depending upon the type of entity you are. If "Don't sell customer data, even surreptitiously" isn't in those bylaws or articles, then the company is free and clear to do that. ToS say…

Oh. Thanks very very much for this clarification; most helpful TIL.

Apologies for not replying sooner; I didn't see this until now!

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