1616574 - echoCancellation cannot be turned off when recording on Windows 10.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Audio/Video: Recording, defect, P2)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:73.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/73.0

Steps to reproduce:

On a Windows 10 machine, browse to the following website:
https://echo-cancellation-tester.netlify.com/

Be sure that both the speakers and microphone work and are turned to a reasonable volume.

Click "Record" and let the short tune play through the speakers and be recorded by the microphone.

Click "Play" to listen to the recording you just made.

Actual results:

You will hear a garbled recording with many drop outs.

Expected results:

When running on Mac OSX or Android, you will successfully hear the tune when playing back.

When running on Windows 10, you will NOT hear the tune - that is, echoCancellation was not successfully turned off.

I notice that on the same machine if I do the same test using the Edge browser it DOES work.

Comment 1

[Jeronimo Torti (Please send NI request to Brindusa Tot)]

Hi,
I was unable to reproduce this issue on my end, I tried on Windows 10, with Firefox Nightly version 75.0a1 (2020-02-27) (64-bit) and Release version 73.0.1 (64-bit).

Does this issue occur with a fresh profile as well? You can find the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Managing-profiles#w_starting-the-profile-manager

You can also try testing if the issue is reproducible in safe mode, here is a link that can help you:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-using-safe-mode

Or you can also try on Firefox Nightly, you can download from here: https://nightly.mozilla.org/ , to see if the issue still occurs there as well.

Thanks in advance. I chose a component for this bug in hope that someone with more expertise may look at it. We'll await their answer.

Regards,
Jerónimo.

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

I tried a fresh profile. The results are the same: echoCancellation still won't turn off.

I tried in safe mode. The results are the same: echoCancellation still won't turn off.

I tried Firefox nightly. The results are the same: echoCancellation still won't turn off.

I wonder if the way Edge initializes and interacts with the microphone hardware is different from the way Firefox does. Are the two browsers making the same API calls to the microphone?

Comment 3

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

I can't reproduce locally either, but I don't hear much effect when echoCancellation is true either.

Paul, would you please attach the Media section of about:support? There may be a hardware-specific component to this issue.

Comment 4

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Probably a case of an APO or driver or things inserted below our audio code that does something weird.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2014/05/15/real-time-audio-in-windows-store-and-windows-phone-apps/ outlines what we need to do (Search for "System.Devices.AudioDevice.RawProcessingSupported", which brings to roughly the important part).

Comment 5

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Reporter, would you mind testing again with a Firefox Nightly Build, that is likely to have a fix for the issue your reported (and more). It installs alongside your regular Firefox and won't tamper with your data, you can simply uninstall it right after.

The fix is in our audio input/output library, https://github.com/kinetiknz/cubeb/pull/616.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

I just retested it on the same computer I used before and I think the problem is fixed.

Thanks so much for the attention!

Comment 7

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Thank you very much for following up, I'm closing this as fixed then. Thanks also for reporting the issue in the first place!