[Ekiga-list] poor quality voice in ekiga

[Jason Haar <Jason Haar trimble co nz>]

Hi there

Basically I find that ekiga and twinkle both have TERRIBLE recording 
quality (tested under FC8,F10 and F11). When I'm talking to someone 
over them, the other person always comments on how bad the line sounds.
However,  skype recording (conversations) sounds perfect. Doing some
digging shows me that using the command-line ALSA tool "arecord
file.wav" produces a similarly crappy recording, but "arecord -f cd
file.wav" produces a much better sounding output - the big difference is
the default is 8000Hz and the latter is 44KHz? Forcing different codecs
doesn't appear to improve things: my voice comes through "staticy" and
WAV voicemails saved in /var/spool/asterisk/voicemail are all 8000Hz
too. It's as if the soundcard is outputting to the codec a "low quality"
audio - so the codec can't magically make it better (i.e. garbage in,
garbage out)

It smells to me like ekiga/twinkle aren't "telling" pulseaudio (although
I think this is an old issue and affects ALSA too) to choose a higher
quality recording format and that's the root cause of my problem?

Has anyone else experienced this, and is there a workaround?

My arecord/skype tests show Linux voice recording is good enough at the
lowest API levels - it's just that ekiga doesn't makes use of it?
I'm hoping I'm doing something wrong and someone here will point me in
the right direction :-)

This has been tested with ekiga-2.0.11 and 3.0.2 (I'm running F10 and
F11). I've tried to upgrade to the current release, but I'd have to tear
half my system apart to take care of the dependencies - so no go.

Thanks
Jason

-- 
Cheers

Jason Haar
Information Security Manager, Trimble Navigation Ltd.
Phone: +64 3 9635 377 Fax: +64 3 9635 417
PGP Fingerprint: 7A2E 0407 C9A6 CAF6 2B9F 8422 C063 5EBB FE1D 66D1