Discord client settings for "Music Place"

This is a copy of the content in the #documentation channel in the server itself, for better viewing convenience when also in the Discord settings panel.  Please also see the general intro page for the server if you haven't, for overall operation instructions.

To get the best audio performance from Discord, several client-side settings should be changed away from inadequate defaults.  Highly compressed and gated voice transmission is probably great for interactive gaming, which is indeed Discord's original purpose for existence, but is lousy for carrying the dynamic range and subtle nuances of music or even ordinary conversation.  So here we go over how to fix that, as well as basic usage hints for audio/video channels in general.  It's not so different from Zoom or any other conferencing system at its heart, even in the realm of the more technical parts of setup, and we'll always have a little bit of learning ahead with using any new app.

music server logo
It helps to have another person in the same channel listening and making observations on results of settings changes, as indeed we do with Zoom when doing sound checks -- it's almost impossible for anyone to know how they sound *into* a videoconference by themselves, without having help or bringing another device into it for "full loopback".  Some of this is rather subjective, and may respond differently to different hardware, so some experimentation and deviation from this baseline may well be needed.
 
      #documentation

This is generally what you'll see at the bottom left of a desktop client, or in one of the slideable "panes" of mobile apps.

  • To mute and unmute yourself, use the familiar microphone icon.
  • To "deafen" yourself, the headphones icon next to the mic toggles your output sound.
  • To disconnect from the channel, click the "handset with the X over it" icon pointed to by the arrow.
        (That's the obscure one, but think of it as "leave meeting".)
  • The gear is how you access all the settings in your own client -- so let's go ahead with that!

    Audio settings     !*important*!

To get best performance from Discord when sending music or even just human voice, you should fix some settings in a similar way as we're familiar with on Zoom.  Discord's defaults are pretty awful.  Click the gear at the bottom of your left-ish hand channel column, and select "voice and video".  On that sheet, you can set your device inputs and outputs at the top, and then scroll down and modify the rest of the settings.

Input volume:   80% - 100%   (it may already be about there)
Ouput volume:   centered, which is "100%"
Input sensitivity:   toggle OFF
Then adjust the orange/green sensitivy slider between -80 and -70 dB

When your mic is unmuted and you're not speaking, your sound level should be bobbling just above and below the slider.  That way, your slightest sound will be transmitted and not "gated."  If you have unavoidable ambient room noise such as computer fans running, you may want to set the slider a little higher above that threshold, but not too far to avoid too much "cutout" at soft voice/playing volumes.

Farther down...

Noise reduction:   OFF     <== this is possibly THE most important setting
Automatic gain control (AGC):   OFF   (for most cases, but experiment)
Echo cancellation: *depends*.
    If you're running external speakers, you probably want it ON.
    If using headphones, f'geddaboudit, leave it OFF.   (best for performances)
Quality-of-service switch: Try ON and send stuff, if it fails, turn it off.
    [It just sets __TOS 0xa0__ in UDP packets]

Again, some of this may be variable.  Some controls may be missing if you're running in a browser instead of the downloadable client.  Depending on your platform [Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile?] some controls may be missing or others not covered here may be present.  As more people experiment, these instructions can evolve.


Streaming from applications

On most platforms, if you share your screen or a single running app into a discord "stream", the audio from that app or your system will also get fed into Discord.  On Linux, a little more work is needed to fiddle with the audio plumbing and send the system output into something that Discord can use as an input.  For Ubuntu and the "pulseaudio" subsystem specifically, we need to run a couple of shell commands to get this set up before Discord will accept system audio as an alternative "microphone" input.  Note that this will disable input from your normal microphone!  This does not set up a mixer, it only changes what feeds into Discord's normal audio path.  The result should be the same in the native Discord client or a browser.

While the exact procedure may vary on different distributions, on relatively standard Ubuntu the procedure is this: bring up a shell/terminal window, and issue:

    pactl  load-module  module-combine-sink  sink_name=fakeout
    pactl  set-default-source  fakeout.monitor
This creates an additional "input" that is a copy of the system output.  That's it; you can close the terminal window if you want.

Then, use the "gear" and go to "voice and video" settings in Discord.  The "input device" may already show "simultaneous output" or something similar, but if it doesn't yet, click the dropdown and select it.  You no longer see any response in the sensitivity bar when you speak, but you should from starting and stopping your playback app.

example of input selection
Input selection dropdown
When you escape out of this back to Discord, make sure your microphone is unmuted because that's now your stream!  After you're done with the app stream and want your normal microphone active again, issue
    pactl  unload-module  module-combine-sink
in the terminal and that should reset everything back the way it was.  Check the Discord input again to make sure it's seeing the microphone.

There are some other tricks to feed computer or webcam microphone input in on top of this, but it's rather klunky and a bit more complex and not of sufficient interest to describe here.  And you definitely want to be in headphones if you're going to mess with that.  Most people that want to set this sort of thing up will connect an external audio mixer or sound input device and control the stream mix from there.


_H*   220117, 231108