No volume on outgoing audio

audiooutboundperipheralbehavior

There is an outgoing audio stream, but at no point in time, was there any volume on its media source.

Description

When there are outgoing audio streams, we check to make sure there’s audio on them. We raise this Observation if there is an audio stream with a media source (=microphone) that is connected but we “hear” no volume in that stream.

This can be a normal behavior, such as people joining a meeting and keeping their microphones muted throughout the meeting. It can also indicate that the selected microphone isn’t connected properly or doesn’t produce any real audio - this can be the case with virtual microphones or microphones with a built-in mute capability. This can also point to bad audio processing that affects captured audio streams such as when AEC, AGC are activated in the application and on the (external) devices used.

What do we do here?

We check outgoing audio streams and their media sources to detect if there is volume on these streams. We do that only for streams that are connected for more than 2 seconds.

See also