David Knell wrote:
On Thu, 2009-07-30 at 09:21 +0800, Steve Underwood wrote:
High quality conferencing is a difficult task, and still a research topic. No two conferencing systems perform alike. The interesting thing about this and other reports is that the conferencing in Freeswitch is not very clever right now, yet people are already saying it beats various other offerings, including long time commercial offerings.
It may well be that a simplistic implementation (noise gate, add them all up) is all that's required for dealing with small groups or, more generally, groups of any size which have a small number of active speakers at any one time: it's predictable and unlikely to introduce unpleasant side effects.
This is one of those situations where when you've experienced something better you make that your baseline for acceptability. I would consider a noise gate horribly crude, and VAD as the minimum for acceptable performance. If you've only used a noise gate you get used to it. If you're not sufficiently versed in the art you may well think nothing better is even possible. The fact that even the simple scheme, with noise gating, in Freeswitch is getting high praise, is pretty damning of mature commercial products. Steve