Discord is not communicating with the open-source community (XLR bug macOS)

[GenuineJakob]

Summary

Mac users can't properly use audio interfaces with XLR inputs in Discord since February 2020. Discord has a statement on their website that they actively work with the WebRTC open-source community to fix this bug.
The community answered to the Discord developers' bug report that the version of WebRTC Discord is using was already one year old, and they should try a more recent version. Unfortunately, the development team of Discord never replied, and since nothing has changed so far, I assume the application still uses the old version.

 

Quotes

Quote

Our engineers became aware of the aforementioned issue in February 2020. We have isolated our lack of audio interface compatibility to an underlying issue with WebRTC on macOS. We rely on the open source WebRTC framework to provide voice services cross-platform, and we are working with the greater WebRTC community to get this issue fixed

Discord Website

 

Quote

We are using M72. The issue only happens in native WebRTC ADM.

joz...@discordapp.com (Last visit: 280 days ago)

 

Quote

"You should at least start by comparing with the latest version. M72 is very old."

"Did you try a more recent version? M72 is more than a year old."

WebRTC community 

 

My thoughts

I like the concept of Discord, and I use it every day. It is disappointing that a company with an assumed revenue of $120 million does not want to fix this bug. Furthermore, they are silencing complaints with a statement that is either untrue, or they are working in Valve Time. I cancelled my Discord Nitro subscription, and I hope that this gets some attention. After more than a year, they at least give us an update.

 

Sources

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040580711

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/webrtc/issues/detail?id=11378

[Levent]

oh ok.

[Spotty]

I've moved this post to Programs, Apps, and Websites. I'm assuming you're having this issue yourself, so while it's likely relevant to you, a blog post from a year ago is not news.

 

5 minutes ago, GenuineJakob said:

and I hope that this gets some attention. After more than a year, they at least give us an update.

You would be best off contacting Discord support directly about any issues you are experiencing instead of trying to raise awareness by posting about it here.

[GenuineJakob]

1 hour ago, Spotty said:

You would be best off contacting Discord support directly about any issues you are experiencing instead of trying to raise awareness by posting about it here.

 

Quote

"I’m terribly sorry to hear that you’re running into these issues. Unfortunately, this issue with audio interfaces for voice chat on macOS is a known issue that our team is investigating and working on a fix. However, I sadly don't have an exact ETA for when a solution will be available." - Discord Support

The new thing about this is not the bug itself or the posts from the community. Now a year has passed by, and the official support does not share any progress. It looks like Discord is not doing anything and wants to sit this out. I want people to know about this, so the company has an incentive to start developing a fix. This should be in the news for gaming and Discord related topics, but I understand that it also belongs here in software discussion.

[Kilrah]

The only way something would happen is a large number of people who all need this feature to hammer the support every 2 weeks...

It's probably only a tiny fraction of their user base that's affected, and as such low priority is put on it

[Tobias Timpe]

This should not me marked as a solution. I was pretty much the one who originally reported this problem. I use a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 as my audio interface. This problem started occurring in mid-February 2020 when Discord switched their audio engine to an “improved” implementation of their own. Before that, they had an option to use an “experimental audio engine” which solved this problem. 
 

Also, this problem does not occur with all audio interfaces, a friend of mine uses an Audient ID4 just fine. I suspect it has something to do with sample rate conversion as Discord uses 16-Bit/48kHz for voice audio and many interfaces are 24-bit only, which would explain the stuttering.

 

This is the source of the problem: https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/+/refs/heads/master/modules/audio_device/mac/

Unfortunately I haven’t found out what the fix is as of yet as I haven’t had the time to build an example app. If anyone here is experienced enough in CoreAudio, feel free to help.