After a billion years I’m finally using a mic for PC gaming. I’m finding the Steam chat function is a little laggy and staticky. Is this normal or should I be using some external service?
It’s really not that great. I found the voice quality lacking.
What do you like to use?
I use Skype for all online voice chat that I do. Depending on what you’re playing and with who, Ventrilo might be frequently used as well.
If you’re playing with friends, though, just have everyone get a Skype account and use it.
Steam’s voice is convenient in that it doesn’t require a server login.
Mumble and Teamspeak are probably the ones I use the most.
Yeah mumble or vent really at this point.
Didn’t they upgrade Steam’s voice chat to use the Skype codec recently? Maybe it’s something you have to enable somewhere.
Steam’s overall voice chat quality did get a good bit better after the update you’re talking about Fugitive, but it’s still not as good as Skype. I really only use the Steam voice chat when I’m playing a coop game online that already uses Steam because it is pretty easy to use and convenient.
Strangely enough, the L4D voice chat is extremely good.
So we just played Left for Dead 2 with Skype instead, and WOW!!! I can’t even explain how much better the experience was. My question… if Skype can sound so good, why can’t Steam?
Thanks for those that suggested it.
I swear I must not have very sensitive ears or something as I read these comments frequently that Steam or some other service has such subpar quality and no matter which of them I use they all sound the same aside from volume changes.
I like some more than others because of their UIs or the easy room setup and lack of port info needed I was recently reintroduced to with TeamSpeak, but sound quality? I’m just not hearing it. Now people broadcasting their loud speaker sounds while using a desk mic, yeah, that I notice. But what’s the big culprit among folks that do notice something wrong? A hissing, lots of static, missing gaps in what the person was saying?
Steam doesn’t sound as good because while it uses the Silk audio codec, it doesn’t do as much Magic™ as Skype does. Magic includes pre-processing the audio to remove noise and adaptively changing the audio codec output format.
Regarding comparing Steam to Teamspeak, it’s likely Steam will sound better these days, because AFAIK, Ventrilo and Teamspeak still don’t default to a wideband audio codec, meaning they’ll inevitably sound somewhat more like a telephone conversation than normal speech. Either mess around with the options and convince everyone else on the server to do so as well, or move to Mumble, which is free and better anyway.
In-game voice chat in TF2 has always been fine for me. I don’t see people’s problem with it.
Maybe it’s just my experience (and I haven’t used it in a year+), but Skype is terribly laggy. 100ms delay etc. It’s meant for phone calls, not games, so I wouldn’t really use it as such.
Mumble and Teamspeak3 are great. High quality, even if you narrow their bandwidth. Easy to use as well and have lots of cool features like overlays and auto-attenuation. And if you just want to voip with a few people on a game, you can easily start a mumble server in seconds and just hand out your ip. I’ve never had a problem with these two things.
Teamspeak 2, on the other hand, is terrible. But at least it was better than skype.
Like Pod, lag was what drove me to Mumble. I was previously using steam’s built in chat, but the difference in delay between it and Mumble was night and day.
Mumble also seems more convenient since people can drop into and out of servers/channels at their choosing without impacting me, compared to Steam’s chat (and Skype for that matter) requiring that I click to acknowledge someone’s call.
I use Teamspeak 3 because someone I vaguely know has a server which we can all use. Mumble’s equally good though. Steam has had persistent issues for me with not all parties able to hear each other, low sound quality, etc.
Skype’s OK, but it doesn’t have push-to-talk. For me that’s a dealbreaker - I want to be able to talk to my girlfriend or swear like a navvie when I play without broadcasting it to everyone.
Does steam yet allow you to route voice communication through your headset with game sounds through speakers?
They’ll add that when they allow downloads to properly continue whilst you play a game. i.e. never.
I use Vent and TeamSpeak 3. TeamSpeak 2 was not nearly as good as TS3, but TS3 is very good. Ventrilo does have the edge, but mostly because vent servers have to meet standards.
I’ve used Steam chat for TF2, but not recently. The one ingame voice chat that doesn’t play well for me is the voice chat client in Lord of the Rings Online.
Skype has a push-to-mute function. I know, it’s inferior to push-to-talk, but should it ever be your only option…
In that case “never” is really close because " allow downloads to properly continue whilst you play a game" was announced as one of improvements to Steam infrastructure announced few days ago - expect beta in few weeks.