Simple idea but looks to be perfectly made - I'm about to start a podcast soon and the audio quality from this is easily 10x what I was planning to use to record calls.
This is great, eager to try it the next time we have guests on the podcast. One immediate desire would be to see an option for simple, local WAV recording instead of sending data away and getting it back as WEBM.
@mostlymarius We had WAV in an earlier version but it's so big that it destroys the call quality :( Instead, we *do* record everyone's local audio but compress it with MediaRecorder (currently only supports WebM) in a very high bitrate and send that.
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@mikeal Makes sense! I guess I was envisioning a parallel stream...the current WebM compressed data being used for the call itself and a separate, pre-compressed version being left on disk for podcast editing use. One of the biggest complaints I have about similar product like Zencastr is that you have to make guests wait around for files to upload instead of them being able to just quickly grab a file and upload it whenever and however they want to.
WebM is fine, don't get me wrong, it just adds a decompression/transcoding step that I'd rather be without, especially since it's not a widely supported container yet and seems focused on video+audio rather than just audio.
@mostlymarius I'd definitely prefer to be doing a different lossless encoding but we're a little limited by the browser. We could potentially do mp3 but it would end up increasing the bundle size (encoder is an additional library) and would be lower quality than Ogg OPUS.
Also, just so that we're clear, we are basically sending *two* audio streams to the recorder. One is the WebRTC "realtime" audio channel, which is variable bitrate OPUS, and that's what you hear from the remote callers. Additionally, in the data channel we stream the higher bitrate locally recorded audio. If the connection is slow the people in the call will still need to hang out for a minute while the audio finishes uploading the person that recorded it.
We're open to suggestions for improvements tho, please log an issue, and there's already one for providing mp3 https://github.com/mikeal/roll-c...
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@mikeal Right on. I'm certain you've found the best approach available at the moment. I'm mostly just commenting from an outside perspective as someone who's still searching for the ultimate, frictionless podcast VoIP system for bringing guests onto a show. Roll Call is doing a great many things just the way I like them, so I'll be keeping an eye on it as you continue to build it out. :)
Can't wait to see the things built on top of this. So many uses including podcasting popping up already! Why didn't this exist all this while; less is more indeed :)
I just joined a party with 6 random people. It was surreal lol. The fact that this is voice only right now makes it a differentiator almost. Would love to see where this simple solution goes! Thanks for sharing @bentossell
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When Safari, in particular Mobile Safari, supports the backend tech behind Roll Call, I'll finally be able to record podcasts on an iPad Pro!
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