I’m running Fedora Linux 40 (more software & hardware specs below) and I’ve found that, when I’m on a call with others, my voice comes through to them muffled and metallic (not sure how to describe better). This occurs both with the internal microphone and with the mic on my bluetooth headphones. When I record myself using Cheese, my audio sounds fine. How do I troubleshoot an audio transmission problem?
Which VoIP application are you using?
Audio problems like this might be caused by:
sample rate
sample width (bits per sample)
sample rate converter
echo canceller.
sound hardware buffer sizes.
“Muffled, metalic” points most likely to the sample rate converter.
For example, when you record sound with cheese, it is probably recording at the same sample rate as the ADC, thus no sample rate conversion.
Sample rate converters can have difficulty with certain rate changes. E.g. 44100 to 8000 is a difficult one and often sounds metallic, but 48000 to 8000 works much better. (Integer multiple)
So, I would suggest finding out what sample rate your VoIP app wants, and adjust the system ADC rate to either 44100 or 48000, whichever one converts better.
In general I find 48000 is a better system ADC rate to use.
You will need to google to find out how to change the system rate on you distro because I don’t have your one installed here.
It was happening across multiple VoIPs (Google Hangouts, Discord, and Zoom). You were correct that Cheese and Hangouts used different sample rates (44.1 kHz and 48 kHz, respectively). While I wasn’t able to figure out how to change the sample rate, my brother and I discovered that my input volume (Settings/Sound/Input) was at the maximum and that bringing it down to ~40% greatly improved sound quality. Thank you for your help!