Since I switched to a Fairphone 6 with /e/OS, everyone I talked to on the phone noted that my audio sounds weird. I didn’t have this issue with my previous phone (not a Fairphone), and it’s apparently also noticeably worse than the audio quality of a landline call. It’s possible to have a conversation, though – my connection doesn’t break up or anything.
I tried different voice recorders to check if it’s an hardware issue. I’m able to record absolutely okay audio with the Fossify Voice Recorder, so the mics itself seem to be fine.
Is there a setting or something else I can try? Are there other users experiencing a similar phenomenon?
OS: /e/OS 3.1.4 (Official)
Network: 5G
VoLTE (“4G Calls”): Enabled (I confirmed with my network provider that this is actually offered and works with my number)
Wi-Fi calling: Tried both enabled / disabled
Side note: The voice recorder app coming with /e/OS (org.lineageos.recorder) delivers rather bad audio on my Fairphone 6. “Low Quality” is very muffled, “High Quality” is understandable, though tinny and with reverberations and also significantly worse than the recordings by the Fossify Voice Recorder. The LineageOS voice recorder is also the app I used on my previous phone without any issues, producing really okay recordings, so this is extra confusing to me.
current audio-tagged FP6 issues are mostly related to bluetooth and usb, not tinny voices. Did you in this forum or anywhere else read similar reports for your device?
watch for work in config/audio/ in the device tree (branch will change over time), anything that would import new definitions.
There were audio related fixes in the FP6.QREL.15.122.0 release and /e/OS was bumped to that firmware.. kind of expected more config changes in audio/ by that bump, but there’s this at least:
No, I haven’t so far. None of my Fairphone-friends use /e/OS (yet), sadly, so I couldn’t check on their devices, either.
Yes! However, I’m not completely sure if that was a 3.1→3.2 improvement because I missed labeling my recordings from the other (receiving) phone properly. The call audio is okay now with 3.2, at least in the tests. Only the recordings with the /e/OS voice recorder are still terrible.
I posted just now about the terrible recorder quality with the standard /e/os app. It’s unusable for anything except a single voice close to the mic, and still poor for that. I think it should be relabled “1980s Dictaphone” in its current state. I guess I should be happy that is not the mic on my brand new FP6 that’s rubbish. You had better results with Fossify recorder?
Absolutely. The recordings made with the Fossify recorder sound fine. The worst I could do was with the “system default” setting, which was still way better than anything I could achieve with the standard /e/OS / LineageOS recorder.
(Sorry, my previous reply seems to have not been posted)
Thanks, that’s helpful. I used “Sound recorder” on my previous phone which is a nice lightweight app at 1MB and seems to have good privacy. But I’ll try this and see how it looks.
I just installed /e/OS 3.3 on a new FP6, and people have complained about bad phone call quality when I call them, as well as a lack of background noise filtering when environmental sounds are present (e.g. people talking close by). Issues not reported with previous phones.
I have the same difference described above in recording quality between the stock recorder (very poor) and fossify recorder (standard quality).
I have the same issue on my new Fairphone 6 with e/os 3.3. People I have on the phone complain about the audio quality being bad/weird. Recording with the stock recorder also provides poor quality. Recording with Fossify Voice Recorder performs notably better.
Therefore I think its not the hardware being defective but a suboptimal choice of audio codec. Does someone know of a bug report that relates?
Are there any news regarding this issue? Lots of people complain to me about the poor sound quality when I’m on the phone with them. Since it is most-likely a software problem, it should be fixable with an update? It would be awesome if someone could fix that
The FP6 records audio extremely high level, which produces artefacts (clipping etc).
In a nutshell: It is impossible to record live music with a FP6. The video quality is excellent, the audio quality is crap.
And since both camera apps and the audio recorder app do not have attenuator or ALC functionality, there is nothing that can be done to alleviate the (massive!) problem…
And my FP6 is just a couple of weeks old, came directly from Fairphone, and is now on version 3.5 of Murena, 3.6 pending as of today.
