When trying to use the skype program on my mac G4 with OS 10.4.9, I get
noise. My connection is through a cable modem, using the Logitech
ultra vision camera. The cable modem is connected to a router, for
other computers in use.

Ichat is not used, because other members do not have ichat, and they
having been using skype for a while, and did not want to convert.


Have other had similar problems, and what was remedy.

drt

In article
<tuckerdr-26E086.21362221032007@news.lga.highwinds-media.com>,
Don Tucker <tuckerdr@cox.net> wrote:

> When trying to use the skype program on my mac G4 with OS 10.4.9, I get
> noise. My connection is through a cable modem, using the Logitech
> ultra vision camera. The cable modem is connected to a router, for
> other computers in use.
>
> Ichat is not used, because other members do not have ichat, and they
> having been using skype for a while, and did not want to convert.
>
>
> Have other had similar problems, and what was remedy.
>
> drt

This is a question with a complicated answer.

The short answer is, there is no way for anyone to tell you where
the noise is coming from. The long answer is an explanation of the
possible sources of noise and how you can tell the difference between
them.

Let's look at the process. At the other end of your Skype connection,
audio is detected, amplified, digitized, encoded, compressed and
encrypted. At your end, it is decrypted, decompressed, decoded,
converted to analog, amplified and finally emitted by the speakers.

Everything after the digitizer on the transmitting and the DAC on
the receiving end is almost immune to noise that you can hear,
because the codec, compression/decompression and the IP transmission
are designed to cover up errors that you would hear.

So the long and short of it is, it's very unlikely to be the fault of
Skype. If it works at all, it should give you clean audio out.
Working at all becomes a problem if anybody at any connection you are
using has a slow connection or a heavily loaded CPU. What you would
experience in that case is connections that break at random and
intermittent audio when you do have a connection ... not noise.

If you're having those kinds or problems, the solution is to stop
using Skype. If security is not a big issue, Ventrilo is a much
lighter application that hardly takes any CPU time at all, and it's
available on Mac and PC platforms. Ventrilo connects point-to-point,
as opposed to Skype which uses servers for connection.

So, back to the subject of noise.

My experience with noise is that it more often comes from near the
source than otherwise, and if it does, there is little you can do.
Is the noise there whenever you speak to ANYBODY, or only when certain
persons are connected? If the latter, it is because that person has
either a lot of noise in his environment, which his mike is picking up
and sending to you for your annoyance, or he has a bad audio input
system. If it's a noisy environment the best solution is for him to
either eliminate the noise sources or use a headset, which greatly
enhances the ratio of voice to ambient noise, and will likely push
the audible noise level below your annoyance level.

Second, that noise could be generated by your computer's audio output
system. To tell if that is the case, what you need to do is make
your computer play some audio that isn't noisy, like a music CD (except
grunge and heavy metal, which might contain enough noise to mask levels
that would be unacceptable in speech). If that comes out clean, it's
not in the audio path you're using. Make sure that you set Skype and
your comparison audio source to use the same outputs.

If the noise is there even on something that you think should sound
clean, the problem is at your end for sure. There are a number of
places it could be injected. I'll list them in the order that you
could readily test them:

1. Bad speakers (or phones, if you're using phones)
2. Bad speaker wires.
3. Bad connector on the audio output you're using
4. Noisy audio amplifier on the output channel. (hard to test)

There's another very unlikely possibility, that DAC sample clock
on your computer is bad. I expect that would most likely mess
up your clean audio source, too.