Hello Bashar,

I do not know, where these crackles may come from, but maybe disabling the direct-sound option can help. Please try it.

If it is a problem which can be solved by a jitter control, this is a topic for Heiko, the author of phoner and phoner lite. He will then write something about it here.

Sincerely, Jens

First question: Do you really use the latest version of Phoner (2.02) and PhonerLite (1.29)?
Did you messure the jitter with an external tool like Wireshark?
In which direction the sound quality is bad? What codec is in use?

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That is very, very bad!

Did you test with other softphones? They don't have this problem?
Please do a Wireshark trace and send me the file to my [urlmailto:info@phoner.de]mail address[/url]. You can analyze the RTP traffic with Wireshark. There you can see the jitter and other things.

Are you testing with a special provider? It would be good for me to reproduce this problem. I don't have a counterpart that sends with such high jitter.

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Thank you for looking in to the problem.

Can you see the jitter from the trace I sent?  Would having a contrasting trace of Phoner without crackles help?  Does the debug log from Phoner contain the jitter information like the statistics tab from PhonerLite?  Would  having an audio recording of PhonerLite with crackles help in anyway?

I appreciate how much more difficult it is debug a problem if you can't reproduce it, but I really think if the problem is markedly different in Phoner and PhonerLite and they rely on the same internals, it should be possible to figure out what is different.

I have some other testing I would like to do.  So far, I've used UDP.  I'd like to try TCP.  My router does not forward most ports.  Let me configure my laptop as the DMZ and see if that changes anything.

On a separate note, is the source to Phoner and PhonerLite available?

Thanks,
Steve

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Now that's odd.  You had the same jitter values but it did not result in audible crackles?  I had assumed that the difference between Phoner and PhonerLite was in the network handling.   But if the jitter is not the cause of the crackles, maybe it is in the connection to the sound device.

Changing the sound device in PhonerLite is difficult since you can only access it in the wizard.  I did retest with Phoner though, selecting both "default" and my specific sound device.  Neither selection resulted in the crackles I hear in PhonerLite.  I think I'm going to try to find a way to record a short PhonerLite call just so you don't think I'm making this up.

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Phoner does not exhibit the problem when using DirectSound.  When I try to disable DS, Phoner goes crazy after about 10 seconds and eats the CPU.  I then have to kill it.  Since PhonerLite does not have any options regarding DirectSound, I assume it uses it all the time.  Can you confirm this?

I will try to get a recording of the crackles so you don't think I'm crazy.  I will also try to disable DirectSound on only the input or output sound device in Phoner to see if I can isolate the CPU hog problem to one or the other.

Thanks,
Steve

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Thanks!  It's nice to know where that function is accessed.

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Bingo!  That's where the difference in crackles are coming from.  I ran a test with it set to 240 and I'm fairly sure the quality sounded the same as PhonerLite.  I don't suppose there is any way to make that dynamic based of the current jitter value, kind of like the dynamic send and receive buffer, is there?

On a separate note, I tested again and the 100% CPU hang that I mentioned earlier only seems to be triggered with _both_ microphone and speaker DirectSound disabled.  And, it seems to be more easily triggered by bumping the microphone.  So it might have something to do with clipping or overscale input or something like that.

Thanks for helping me isolate where the difference in audio quality was coming from.  Helps me not feel like I am going crazy!

Cheers,
Steve