Improving Voice Message Listening Experience: Global Player and Waveform display

Feature Proposal
1

This feature proposal is a collection of some ideas to improve the voice message listening experience.

  • The seeking bar should be a waveform of the audio

    • Looks better and gives some more orientation of where you are in time.

  • Option to change playback speed of voice messages (x1, x1.25, x1.5, x2)

  • Play next audio message when current audio message finished playing (maybe with sound in-between like signal does it)

  • Utilize read state to show a dot on messages you have not listened to - don’t mark audio messages as read before that?

  • Global Player, so you can keep listening to a long voice message while browsing other chats.

references:

6 Likes
2

It would be absolutely amazing if all of this gets implemented.

Also, I was digging through the code and found the following:

private static final int SAMPLE_RATE = 44100;
private static final int SAMPLE_RATE_INDEX = 4;
private static final int CHANNELS = 1;
private static final int BIT_RATE_BALANCED = 32000;
private static final int BIT_RATE_WORSE = 24000;

A 32 kb/s audio bitrate isn’t exactly high quality.

It would be great to have an option in the settings to adjust the quality of sent voice messages:
128 kb/s | 64 kb/s | 32 kb/s

Of course, it could be represented as:
• High quality
• Medium quality
• Low quality

Since with the release of channels, people would want to listen to podcasts in good quality. I understand that separate audio uploads are possible, but for privacy reasons, I’d prefer to be able to record directly in Delta Chat.

3

There is no way to increase the speed of audio playback of voice messages on iOS. This exists on Desktop for Linux.

This is an essential feature for heavy voice message users since most people are able to listen at 2x speed without an issue.

1 Like
4

I’m listening podcasts on 1.75 usually, and even 2.0 is not fast enough for some speakers.
Also, there may be quite a difference between x1.25 and x1.5 on long podcasts; one is too slow, another is too fast.

5

Continuous speed variation like VLC would be nice.

6

You mean - default speed setting? When you open media, player starts to play with your usual speed, not with 1.0?
It’s a good feature, supported on many players.

For messenger, it’s maybe convenient to remember speed value per contact.

7

No, I mean you can play at 1.5, 1.75, 2× etc., but you can also play at arbitrary speeds like 1.7 or 2.13× if you want to. VLC has a sort of two-level control, discrete preset jumps or, if needed, continuous adjustment.