Webmeeting all day, every day - Feedback

[telis]

Hi,

We as a micro business have been using what we call "virtual office working" since the start of CV19. We all work from home but all 3 or 4 of us are on Webmeeting chat together all day on our notebooks whilst working away on our desktops which we have brought home.

It works really well, but enough of that, on to the bad stuff. We notice the following frustrations daily:-

1. Muting.

When there is a chat going on that doesn't one of us involve us and we want to concentrate we'll mute the speaker. If we are on a phone call we'll mute the microphone.

This has a few aspects. First windows OS muting doesn't work properly with 3CX (or in fact chromium). You can mute your speaker or microphone in Windows using buttons on many (most? all?) keyboards. You can also mute you speaker by turning the windows volume all the way down to zero using the icon near the clock.

If you mute your microphone in Windows or bizarrely, even if you mute your speaker in Windows, your microphone will not work on 3CX until you leave and re join the call. Even more bizarrely if you mute and unmute your speaker the speaker itself will work and you'll hear the other meeting participants but they won't be able to hear you because your microphone won't work. This behaviour appears to be a bug in chromium not 3CX webmeeting - it also happens is you go to - https://www.onlinemictest.com - and do the same thing. I will raise an issue with Chromium and see if they'll fix it and post a link here tomorrow.

It would be a useful addition to 3CX webmeeting if you could mute your speaker using the app, especially given the issue above, an extra icon next to the mute microphone button which mutes your speaker would be useful (but not as good as a working hardware button). I would say that even with your speaker muted the chat notifications should sound.

Incidentally the helper tooltip text that appears over the mute microphone button when you hover reads "Mute Audio" when it should read "Mute Microphone".

2. Meeting chat notifications no longer sound

The meeting chat notifications (say putting your hand up) used to make a sound now they do not - the join and leave actions still make a sound. I think this is likely a 3CX Webmeeting bug. Could someone else please repro?

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Hi telis,

Please advise if this happens specifically with Chromium or you can also replicate in Google Chrome (stable).

We do not support or test Chromium, so if the issues are specific to it then we can only advise that you switch to Chrome.

 

[telis]

Hi telis,

Please advise if this happens specifically with Chromium or you can also replicate in Google Chrome (stable).

We do not support or test Chromium, so if the issues are specific to it then we can only advise that you switch to Chrome.

I happens in both Chrome and Edge (both on stable channel).

 

[JohnS_3CX]

Thanks for your feed back @telis

I did a few tests replicating the steps you mentioned above, but it seems that the when you mute/unmute the mic and speaker from the OS, the web meeting and onlinemictest remain unaffected in my case.

How about if you were test using an entirely different headset or sound device? Wired if possible, not bluetooth.

 

[telis]

@JohnS_3CX

Sorry I should have tested this. We have now tried it on 2 dell notebooks and we have the issue, but another desktop PC and another dell notebook with a different model we have tried does not exhibit the issue.

It must be a problem involving the driver on one of more models of Dell notebook.

The chances of getting Dell to fix it are probably zero

Would be very good to know if anyone else is affected and can repro, espoiacll on dell notebooks.

My notebook is a dell latitude 7300

 

[JohnS_3CX]

if this is happening when using the onboard sound card (using the headphone /mic jacks), you could potentially replace your headset with a USB one.

The USB headsets act as their own independent sound card so you could bypass the issue of Dell drivers.

It may also be worth checking what sound chip the laptop has and getting a generic driver from the chip manufacturer (ie, from Realtek), or the driver that comes with Windows (by uninstalling the Dell driver package). Do note that Dell also releases updated drivers from time to time so I'd check their support site just to be sure

And finally, try to "Restore Defaults" in the Windows sound control panel, as sometimes I noticed some PCs might misbehave under certain shared modes bit depths:


Hope this helps!

 

[telis]

OK. many thanks. I've run out of time today but I'll have a go at this later.