Voice chat problems

I rarely can get voice chat to connect properly. I have voice enabled. When I log in I get the "Connecting to in-world Voice Chat..." message and see the little speaker icon on my chat tab. However, I only succeed in connecting about one time in 10. The rest of the time the speaker icon remains yellow and I never get the white dot above my head indicating that I've successfully connected.

Is anyone else having these problems. More to the point, does anyone know what I can do to improve my chances of connecting.

Like everything else, nothing works in sl. Hit skype.

My succes rate is great, except when I am logged in on msn or yahoo. those programs somehow conflict with sl on my system.

mmm I'm not using either yahoo or msn. I wonder what else could be conflicting. Nice idea tho about conflicting programs. I'll have to check that out further

You need to tell your firewall to allow both SL Voice and SL Voice Agent to connect.

Here's the Knowledge Base topic about that.

https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417

I solved my voice chat problems by removing slvoice.exe from the installation folder.

No voice chat, no problems.

I've gone up and down disabling firewalls, routers, port forwarding, the works. SLVoice.exe is just plain spotty.

For 50% of people it works flawlessly. These people will never once in there life have a single problem with voice.

The other half. Despite following every step, every last thing they need to do to get it working, will never have voice working correctly for them.

So far I have yet to find a clear reason for this.

Well I just turned off my firewall and the results were no different. So I doubt it has anything to do with my firewall. I tried using voice from my laptop. It connects fine there and I'm using the same firewall (Norton).

Since this is computer specific and not related to my SL account, it must have to do with something on my desktop computer that conflicts with SL voice. It's going to be a nightmare figuring out what that is.

That's unfortunate, Monica. It's also unfortunate that people who have nothing to contribute to answering your question insist on making snarky comments about things you obviously are concerned about.

Edit: BTW, do you have a hardware firewall? I have to pass through on both my Norton firewall and my router firewall.

Then Argent, how would you be able hear a play or concert that's not streamed? Or haven't you any interest in that? You don't have to talk, just listen.

Somehow my wireless router was interfering with voice. After I connected the cable directly to my desktop computer, it solved the problem. But no wireless for now.

I guess I wouldn't, but I've never run into such a thing. Even the one time I went to a talk that was advertised as using voice, it was actually done via parcel media: the organizer was just confusing streaming media with voice. And of course, since voice chat and media streaming are completely separate and unrelated systems in Second Life, you don't need to have voice activated to listen to a DJ spinning virtual platters, or hear a play or a book reading, or a concert or musical performance.

Bandwidth issues? SL is a resource hog in and of itself and most of us don't recommend playing it over wireless because of that.

Ive always suspected a bandwidth issue associated with this problem of constant disconnecting and reconnecting. Its obviously a problem on the users side because as Dante pointed out, for many people voice works flawlessly. Do you know if your ISP throttles your bandwidth? Are you on DSL? Are you in an apartment or in an area where you compete with others for bandwidth?
You are not alone in this problem though. I have tried to contact Vivox, the providers of voice in Second Life to see if they have any suggestions. Still waiting on a response. There are in world representatives from Vivox too that I will try and corner and see what they might suggest.

A wireless router or one of those combination DSL modems/wireless routers have a hardware firewall built into them.

You have to get into the configuration software for your router and enable the ports that Voice requires.

This can get pretty arcane...I had to turn it over to the Resident Geek. It was his fault anyway...he went and added "Wireless N" and "Gigabit Ethernet" equipment to our home network that caused the blockage in the first place.

You need voice in the plays I do and attend, and the readings I've attended. Actually we use both stream and voice sometimes. But voice is a must....that's the definition of "live" performance.

Hmm... I'll invite you to one next time.

How is streaming one person's voice (or guitar, or piano, or...) over slvoice.exe different from streaming one person's voice over http?

One doesn't force us to wear a glowing ball over our head....

Edit: Voice allows people to answer back during readings... a live show such as a concert really doesn't need people talking during the performance.

In a play your actors are going to be live from many places across the world. Voice is necessary for that. Also we've found that individuals hearing stream hear it at a different times. Sometimes there's up to a 20 minute delay! That would be impossible to produce a play.

Stream IS good for incidental music, or looped sound effects... but not for those that require a precisely timed cue.

And recording sound tracks with different actors and streaming it sorta defeats the "live" performance idea. Theatre breathes and reacts to audience (even in SL albeit more difficult).

Sorry, it sounded like you were saying performances with one person or broadcast from one location over a single stream are not "live". My mistake.

A couple of comments here:

1) There seems to be 2 threads going here. I'm concerned about my inability to connect to voice most of the time. I'd suggest that the other thread about the pros and cons of using voice at all should move to a different thread. Although I rarely use voice to talk, I am often in situations where I need to listen to someone else talking. Enough said.

2)re my original thread ...

a) I'm not sure how a firewall would be affecting this. If it were a firewall problem it seems to me that it would be a constant thing and I would never be able to connect. The fact that I can connect about 10% of the time suggests to me that it's another problem. I will double check on the hardware firewall issue tho.

b) I doubt that my problem is due to a bandwidth issue. My desktop where I am having the problem IS connected via a hard wire (to cable BTW and not DSL). My laptop where I never have a problem connecting IS connected via wireless (N).

c) I thought the problem could be due to a conflict with a loaded service. Using msconfig, I shut off all services at start up but it did no good. I may have overdone this and shut off my audio so I need to go back and play with this when it's not past midnight.

d)Following Benski's idea, I uninstalled AOL AIM, but I haven't noticed any difference yet. I can't see any other obvious program like that that could be the culprit here.

e) DaQbet, if you get any results from your inquiries, please post them.

I think Lindal gets the prize. By bypassing my router, I determined that the router was causing the problem. This of course implied that it was a port issue. The Wiki says that ports 21002 TCP, 12000-13000 UDP and 5060 or 5062 UDP need to be open (on a computer with a static IP address). However that did not work.

I ran into a JIRA post which advised to open ports 22000-23000 UDP instead of the 12000-13000 range. That seems to work. I can now reliably connect to voice.

What was real strange about this was the fact that it was sporadic. Even without all those ports enabled I was able to connect about 10% of the time.

Perhaps some of you who continue to have problems with voice may want to open the 22000-23000 UDP range and see if it helps. Remember that your computer has to have a static IP address for this to work.