🎉 The next update of Listen is coming soon.
Problems with audio playback

Solving audio playback problems

As an audio player bot, Listen has to consistently maintain real-time audio frames every second.
Region, audio effects, volume and other settings can all affect the playback frames quality.

This article is not a complete solution, but it's a good starting point.

Feel free to ask for direct support to our team here (opens in a new tab).

To solve this issue, continue reading this article:

Diagnosing the problem

Access Listen's industry-leading performance tool

Type /listen performance
This command provides useful information and statistics about performance.
To continue the troubleshooting process, follow the tutorial carefully.

Reference

Here you can check if the problem is on our end.
This will help us diagnose the problem faster.

Finding the problem

To find the problem, we will check for the values highlighted in code blocks

Here's a list of values that can help us diagnose the problem:

Values that influence the general user experience

  • Main socket: A number that represents how many milliseconds Listen takes to communicate with the Discord Gateway API. The lower the better.
  • Execution time: A number that represents how many milliseconds Listen takes to execute commands.
    The lower the better.
  • Memory usage: A number that represents how much memory Listen uses. No impact whatsover.

Values about the RTC (Real-Time Connection) between Listen, Discord and you

  • Latency: A number that represents how many milliseconds Listen takes to communicate with her own Remote Audio Servers (Powered by Lavalink (opens in a new tab) technology). The lower the better.
  • Destination: Exposes the audio destination, indicating the region the voice channel is in (example brazil001.discord.media). Near to you is better.

Values from the Remote Audio Server attached to your voice channel

These values are only available if you are connected to a voice channel.
They will help us diagnose the problem faster.
We will check for signs of stress or high load.

RTC Debugging

  • Sent frames indicate how many healthy audio frames have been sent to the server, example 2.970 [99.00%]. It maxes out to 3.000 (100%). Higher is better.
  • Lost or accelerated frames indicate how many audio frames have been lost or accelerated. Lower is better.

High lost or accelerated frames is a sign of stress caused from audio effects and volume.

Processing load

  • RTC Playback indicate how much CPU load the server is needing to process audio. Lower is better.

High processing load is a clear sign of stress caused from the decoding of multiple unoptimized audio formats (like .mp3 and .aac) concurrently. This affects the playback of files uploaded by users.

Remote player memory

  • Allocated and Used indicate how much memory Listen is using. Higher is better.

High Used is a sign of stress caused from multiple players.

Existing voice sessions

  • Reveals how many servers are attached to this node. Lower is better.

Solving the problem

After checking the problem, you can try disabling some audio filters and setting the volume filter to 100% will reduce lost or accelerated audio frames. You can also change the Region of your voice channel, or use a different voice channel.

Checking if the problem is on your end

If it still doesn't help, you might need to reconnect to your voice channel or free up some resources in your device, such as CPU, as it is responsible for real time audio processing and latency.

Sometimes, if a processor is not powerful enough to process audio, it will lose audio frames more often as Listen's buffer is emitted in a 200 milliseconds interval.

Also, your network's latency may be too high to support seamless, lag-free and real-time Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) connections.

If you still have a problem

Feel free to reach out to us.
Our team is dedicated to offer you the best experience.

Discover. Play. Listen.