Color me a bit surprised when I reviewed a recording of a web conference made with Microsoft Lync and discovered the audio was remarkably awful!
A colleague and I created a promotion piece for the unified communications RFP sessions at Enterprise Connect using our Lync Online accounts. One of the “nice” features of Lync is that the conference, including audio and slides, can be recorded.
Microsoft prides itself on its use of low bandwidth wide-band audio and video codecs, so I assumed that the audio in Lync recordings would be high fidelity.
When we first recorded the Web conference, I was using a USB headset designed for speech dictation – a very good, echo cancelling, noise suppressing headset. Immediately on playing back the recording, my voice sounded “tinny” and distant, a far cry from what my colleague on the other end heard while I was speaking. This session recording may be found here. (Go to about the 2:00 minute mark – the audio distortions are pretty significant.)
We concluded that it must be my headset, so I dutifully changed headsets to a Jabra Pro 9470 headset specially designed to work with Lync. After recording the Web conference again, we noticed the same poor quality audio during playback
We checked the quality of our headsets using both Windows Sound Recorder and Audacity. When recording with these tools, our audio was rich sounding, and clearly wide-band. So, we resorted to recording the audio track separately from the slides, and put them together in a video editing program. The final version has much higher audio quality (click here for a 640x480 version with wide-band audio) but with much higher file size as well.
The lesson learned is that one cannot record Lync collaboration sessions with wide-band audio in the recording. In fairness to Microsoft, the file size of the version recorded with Lync was only 2 MB for a 5 minute recording, which would allow easy distribution of the recording to others. We also tried recording the meeting using WebEx, but the WebEx recording, while slightly better, still had low quality audio. The recordings we created using the video editor with a wide-band audio overlay were between 27MB for CIF resolution (352x288) video, and 200 MB for the HD, 720p version.
I guess I would prefer a “switch” or setting in the Tools->Options area of the Microsoft Lync client that would allow recordings to be made with wide-band audio. This would allow use of Microsoft’s video compression for the slides and other images used in the conference, which would reduce video bandwidth, while providing the listening experience of wide-band audio. Not all meetings need wide-band audio recordings, but some do. It would be nice if such a setting were available to the users.
