I see there’s at least one old thread about this, but I wasn’t able to find obvious actions I should try.
I’ve not used my librem 5 for calls much so far, but when I have done I’ve got complaints about audio quality from the people I’m calling. To me their voices mostly sounded fine, but:
There was clearly echo audible times on both ends (seems more at the start of calls?)
After the echo resolved itself, I was told the audio quality was poor. Switching to a different phone (same SIM) resolved the problem for them every time this happened (which seems to be every call).
Is there something I can play with to attempt to resolve these issues affecting my use of the built-in microphone? Does everybody use external mics for calls?
In my experience there are still call audio problems sometimes, seems random. On most calls I think there are no problems, but sometimes it happens, I then hangup and reboot and hope it works better on next attempt.
One thing you can try that may or may not help is to remove the audio settings files in a particular directory (not sure where now, but it’s discussed somewhere in this forum) and let those files be recreated from scratch because then they get default values.
(The call audio stuff is one of the many many things that I think is not worth the effort to troubleshoot more until PureOS Crimson is ready. It’s quite possible that it all works better when using newer versions of some libraries or similar.)
I guess I mean is that widespread practice amongst librem 5 users, or something that people on this forum would advise doing? Not sure if that answers your question!
So far my problems with this seem to have affected all calls (almost all the calls I’ve made with it so far are outgoing calls I think, if that’s relevant).
Several people in that thread answered that the above gave an improvement for them. I think it did help for me also at some point. (I suspect there are bugs causing those files to end up in a bad state even if the user did not explicitly mess with any settings.)
About the “external mic” thing, I don’t know about that. I usually don’t use antying like that, I just use the phone itself with nothing external attached. I don’t know if call audio would work better or worse if some kind of external mic was used.
I have the same two problems. The only thing I’ve found that reliably helps is to plug in earbuds when making and receiving phone calls. Less than desirable but it completely resolves the problem, whereas the Pulse Audio tweaks I’ve tried in the past helped very little causing me to resume using earbuds - going on three years in September with this still. I’m going to try the @dos fix (again … if I remember correctly. I believe I tried it first, saw no significant improvement and then moved onto other forum mentioned tweaks) that Skalman posted above and will respond with any updates. IMO this is the biggest issue hampering the L5. I’ve emailed purism’s feedback account regarding it. I hope after Crimson, some serious work gets put into it if it’s not fixed by the aforementioned advice (@dos if my call quality still isn’t good after I post back and you need a tester to help give feedback on this issue, sign me up!)
I again tried the above to correct my call quality, but the recipient, using consumer cellular in the US, still received intolerable echo. I’ll continue to use earbuds for now as that always corrects the issue. If anybody knows of another fix for this (in addition i remember trying: a. adjusting call volume settings, b. muting the front left handset microphone speaker using pulse audio) I’d be greatly appreciative! @dos?
Does anyone here know about some convenient way to test this?
I would have liked something like an answering machine that I could call and it would then talk back to me and record what it sounded like from the other end, so that I could test and detect the annoying echo problem without bothering another person multiple times and having to ask them “do you hear the annoying echo this time?”
