Forum Discussion
Allow muting a person only for me
er008 Four years after the pandemic, it's puzzling that a feature widely available in "Discord" and other meeting style software hasn't been implemented in MS Teams, despite this being one of the most widely used "meeting" platforms. Discord offers the ability to adjust audio settings individually for different users, allowing for personalized volume control. Eg, if a participant in a call has overly sensitive microphone settings, you can specifically lower their volume for yourself. This customization enhances the user experience, yet it remains missing from in MS Teams. This can't be difficult to implement.
Issue
It appears that audio stream sent to the Teams client is mixed in the cloud and sent to individual users as a single merged stream.
Benefits
- This reduces the amount of network traffic sent to individual users.
- This typically creates a low-effort solution that covers most use cases.
Disadvantages
- As listed here, sitting next to someone who is also on the call, you must deal with echo.
- There is another issue not mentioned - you cannot change the volume for individual users - there is one person on many of my calls who constantly shouts. I cannot reduce her volume.
Conclusion
Contrary to some of the suggestions here, many products ARE implementing this feature.
Microsoft should send individual voice streams to the client and give customers the option to mute or change the volume on individual users.
Tony_Platts This should be submitted to the Teams feedback portal and everyone here on this thread should vote for it. ;^) Microsoft looks there rather than here in the community threads for what they are going to implement next.
- Yes, I've made a comment about it there as 'me at work' already. Maybe I'll also comment as 'me not at work right now' as well! 🙂
- If everyone could serch for the text of the subject of this thread and vote. If you sort the result of the search by number of votes you can hit the biggest vote numbers first. There are a lot of requests for this feature.
- I do not hear the echo of my own microphone. Obviously each users microphone is excluded from the mix that they receive. So somehow there must exist a separately mixed stream for every user.
It should not be very difficult to exclude additional users, for each mix.Martin_KalchgruberYes. It's the glaring error in the 'Everyone gets the same audio stream' argument. But, however, that is exactly the argument that we get. It's almost as if they are deliberately not allowing muting individually, unless something they did to mute your own audio has tied them in knots and they can't see a way out of it without putting some effort in.
- This kind of echo could even be detected automatically as it is recorded by our microphones.
Maybe they don't like the aspect of controlling the mute from the receiving end of the stream.
One could simply invert this and have the person with the microphone select, to whom they want to send their audio stream.
If the audio streams would be sent in peer to peer fashion I think, that this echo would not even be recognizable and maybe there would not even be a need for this mute functionality.
- It would also be fine if we get the option to mute people from being mixed into our stream in the cloud. I would think every listener has an own stream mixed for them, that mutes their own voice. So there is no reason why others could not also be muted. Except for laziness.
- Exactly! Love this. PLEASE for the love of god fix it.
