#1 2021-09-30 10:56:44

ChrisA

The giant ELEPHANT in the Adobe Room? The audio experience.

Hi All,

I have been a long-term user and fan of the potential of the adobe platform. I consider myself an advanced user designing complex and creative training modules.

Adobe Connect 11 has been a great step forward and is much more stable but having searched this forum I'm wondering if I'm the only one who wants to call out the giant elephant in the room..... The audio experience is terrible!

Surely I'm not alone in this? In every Adobe session(honestly I mean EVERY session) I run there are always people experiencing a terrible audio lag, some who can't even participate. Adobe tech support give the same answers for the last 5 years but eventually I feel like I just want someone to admit the basic 'conference function' of AC totally sucks - especially when participants are really international and joining from different regions.

The delays cause a really uncomfortable unnatural conversation with people interrupting and talking over each other. In a number of sessions we have just had to give up and move to MS teams (which works better for this one aspect). It's so embarrassing because we normally have to persuade the client how awesome adobe is at the outset of a project.

For all the great features in the Adobe tool to not have decent audio feels like failing at the most basic requirement.

Okay, rant over, let me know if you have any insights on this topic.

Last edited by ChrisA (2021-10-04 09:27:08)

alistairlee

Re: The giant ELEPHANT in the Adobe Room? The audio experience.

Hey Chris,

I understand your frustration and agree that the audio is not as good as it should be. Things have gotten much better since the Adobe Connect 11 release last year, but there is more work to do.

The good news is that the team has been working on a major update for both audio and video that will be available in the coming months. I hope I can provide more details on this shortly - the difference is very substantial.

I apologize for the issues you've been having. I recommend, when possible, using the desktop (or new mobile) application over joining in a browser.

Thanks,
Alistair

Connectionist

Re: The giant ELEPHANT in the Adobe Room? The audio experience.

Hello to all,

First, Chris - thank you for being a long-term user, and for providing your candid feedback. We always appreciate hearing from our customers, both when things are good, and perhaps more importantly, when they are not.

While we love hearing that our new interface has offered a great step forward – we have to agree with you about the audio. It has suffered. We acknowledge the elephant and we apologize.

Without trying to make any excuses, please let me try to explain why this has happened. When we were developing our new ‘Standard’ interface for Adobe Connect 11, we wanted to make the transition from our ‘Classic’ meeting as seamless as possible. We reasoned that it would be most convenient for our customers to be able to choose either the Classic or the Standard interface – even within the same meeting! Customers would be able to try the new interface and migrate to the new UI when they were ready. However, in order to achieve this meant that we had to make our wonderful new interface backwards compatible with our older audio and video technologies. It wasn’t easy, but we managed to make all this work in HTML, though we could never reach the performance we had with the original native code. As you noted this has resulted in poor quality and lag.

We had not envisioned that we would still using our original architecture for both audio and video until now. Even the introduction of the ‘Enhanced Audio’ (utilizing the latest Opus codec) in Adobe Connect 11.2 has continued to be undermined by the legacy streaming we are still using. We know where the problems lie.

The good news is that all this will change soon. The Adobe Connect team has been very hard at work completing the final stage of our transition - replacing all of our streaming architecture. In the next few weeks you will hear more about this, but our testing so far has given us the confidence to be able to assure you it will address your concerns about audio and video. Testers around the globe are sharing their cameras, microphones, and screens with virtually no lag, perfect sync, and high quality. We hope it will banish the elephant from the room. 

We are sorry for the audio challenges you are facing today, and we are hurrying, but we hope you can give us just a short while longer to make it right for you.

The Adobe Connect Team

NPFMC

Re: The giant ELEPHANT in the Adobe Room? The audio experience.

Chris,
I agree with you.  We have used AC to broadcast for years, and like the robustness and the flexibility the platform allows. Before the pandemic, we used adobeconnect only to broadcast our in-person meetings and show the powerpoints, etc.  We used VOIP only for sound out.  That worked fine for the most part. Since the pandemic, we've been using it interactively.  We have meetings every other month that lasts for 2.5 weeks, every day.  About 150 people in the room mostly west coast but some international, variety of pods, webcam, share, RefinedData's vantage point, notes, attendees and chat.  I consider myself an advanced user as well. 

Both phone and VOIP had been terrible.  Dropping calls, separate platforms for phone and for VOIP, I could go on and on. We recently switched to Refined Data, and our integrated audio is 10,000% better, and their vantagepoint pod has been a lifesaver.  But AdobeConnect’s listen-only audio for those who aren’t dialing in is intermittent. Luckily our attendees have an option to dial in, which is great because the sound on the phone is clear and steady (thank you RDI).  And other weird stuff.  But we combed through our own logs; support from AC and the previous audio provider was non-existent.

I’m glad we’re not the only ones. At least there’s some comfort in that.  We have developed work arounds if that helps:
1.    We only allow people to join in the app.
2.    We established a youtube channel to broadcast AC’s meeting using the phone audio. People can leave AC and listen there.
3.    We encourage users to call in if listen only doesn’t work well.  Our costs do increase, and people have to have their phone charged and ready to be online all day. (and muted! ?) But at least they can hear!
4.    When we recess our meeting for lunch we close the room. That prevents people from accessing and using the information in the pods for a while, but we’ve found it sort of “refreshes” the room and the audio works relatively well for the next little while once we reconvene. We’re considering doing this at breaks, too.

You’re also correct in the amount of support we get from Adobe’s customer care.  I have tried all the workarounds and what I really want to know is WHAT IS GOING ON ON ADOBE’s SERVERS? With the experiences that we continue to have with our daily meetings, it seems that AC assigns us a server connection based on the number of people we have when we start.  As our room, materials, and attendees grow throughout the day, we exceed whatever server adobe assigned to us and we start having bandwith issues. (I have no clue what's going on, but that's my guess.) I hate that there are no metrics where I can see the trouble might be.  We’re all connected by hi-speed internet, and our green bars at the top of AC are all green and full strength.  Why would our audio in listen-only mode be cutting out? There is something not working or connecting there.

We will be moving to one of the simpler meeting platforms after the new year and I am sorry to be losing all the tools AC gets us.  But at least people will be able to hear what’s going on.

Last edited by NPFMC (2021-10-01 16:18:30)

NPFMC

Re: The giant ELEPHANT in the Adobe Room? The audio experience.

Connectionist - thank you for the explanation. it helps to know at least a little of what is going on on the back end and in the development.  Anytime you can let us know more, it's appreciated.

- Maria Davis

ChrisA

Re: The giant ELEPHANT in the Adobe Room? The audio experience.

Thank you!! 100% more helpful than any official responses we've had when we've tried to escalate.

We are online delivering training courses on Adobe every day so we know when things are working and we know when it is an adobe issue vs a participant(user) issue. Sometimes the corporate answers increase our frustration as customers, the technical explanations above are both more helpful and massively more reassuring.

Sadly some of it is coming too late, two international clients have also decided to leave adobe now so we are having to build using other platforms.

I'm excited and impatient for the big update :)

Last edited by ChrisA (2021-10-04 05:43:19)