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Someone I talk to on Skype a lot has a very persistent issue, where after a few minutes their voice goes very 'robotic'... still understandable but annoying. We can restart the call and it's fine, but fairly consistently after a few minutes it returns.

He experiences this with other people too, not just me - I don't have anyone report problems with my audio quality.

This is not an ISP issue - he gets the same problem on multiple PCs in different countries, in fact he's even recently moved to a different continent and got a new internet connection... same problem.

It seems somehow to be a problem with his Skype account, which is really quite odd. It's been going on for months, if not longer.

What's going on?

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Maybe hes getting bored with the call ? chhhh You're breaking up ! chhhh. No idea sorry, sounds like its downsampling the audio over time to work out the best quality level, but multiple connections discounts that. super odd. – Sirex Jan 14 '11 at 10:46
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This could simply be because his voice is too loud and is causing "clipping" of the audio or his mouth may be too close to the mic. Does he use a headset? Does he set up the audio before dialling anyone up? – Tog Jan 14 '11 at 11:15
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Should be easy to test. try a different person signed in as him using his hardware. – Sirex Jan 14 '11 at 11:26
It's perfectly fine for about 5min, it's not typical loudness distortion. Hence use of the 'robotic' word. And he's experienced this on multiple PCs AFAIK, with/without headsets. – John Jan 14 '11 at 12:09
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So it's different machines, different internet connections, different mics, and different models of sound card? Your friend is probably just a robot. – TM. May 2 '11 at 14:01
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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Have you turned on the technical info and viewed it during the duration of the call to diagnose this?

From the menu bar

Tools --> Options --> Advanced --> Advanced Settings

And check the box "Display techical info during calls"

Then, while making a call you view the call technical info by going to

From the menu bar

Call --> Call technical Info

Check to see if you're seeing any errors or high cpu usage when you're on the call or if there's anything that really stands out.

From experience, typically the issue is either an issue with bandwith (you can tell if the codec drops from anything other than the SILK_V3 codec) or high CPU usage that's caused this "robotic" voice issue.

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up vote 1 down vote
  1. Go to Start
  2. Control Panel
  3. Sound
  4. Recording and try setting the default to be your sound card, and not your webcam.
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up vote 0 down vote

I have a similar problem with my Headset, after some time my sound in and output gets very bad. So you might wanna try and ask your skype conference partner if he could switch microphones or if it's a USB micro update the drivers for it.

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up vote 0 down vote

You have heavy network jitter in between and skype tries to accomodate it. Once they keep quiet for a second skype resyncs and it goes well again.

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