TeamSound

Compared to Roger Wilco, TeamSound, by Team5150 and WiredRed Software, is a recent arrival in the gaming voice-over-IP arena. Indeed, its website, www.teamsound.com was registered in February 2000. The program's most unique feature is its text-to-speech option, which reads messages typed by your teammates. Our interest lies solely in true hands-free voice-over-IP communication, so we did not investigate the text-to-speech feature. We tested version 4.5 of TeamSound, which was a free 1.8MB download at the time. I say "was...at the time" because a flurry of updates has already brought TeamSound to version 4.8 since we tested it a couple of weeks before this writing.

Unlike Roger Wilco, TeamSound lacks its own voice codecs (compression and decompression software routines), relying instead on codecs that users may already have installed on their computers. The documentation states that if your PC does not already have the necessary routines, you can get them for free as part of the latest version of Netmeeting and/or Windows Media Player from Microsoft. Both our computers already had the required codecs installed. The codecs available at this time support "high compression" at 4.8kbps, "medium compression" at 13kbps, and "low compression" at 32kbps. We tested with "high compression" (the default) because it is the only choice appropriate for 56k modems. According to System Monitor, this codec consumes about 25% of my computer's CPU when recording and playing simultaneously--a reasonable amount. That's the good news.

The bad news is, we had trouble with TeamSound from the outset. First, it took us some time to realize that a user who hosts a session (accomplished by clicking a button labeled "Server: OFF") must manually log in to his own server. (Gee, the other prgrams do this automatically...) We even had to host a server and log into it just to perform a microphone "loopback" test. TeamSound immediately complained that it couldn't initiate the loopback...then did it anyway. Next came a more serious problem: Our conversations were often interrupted by "divide by zero" errors, which necessitated restarting TeamSound. And even when TeamSound kept running long enough between crashes to launch a game of Quake II, it allowed us only one-way communication; either I could hear my buddy or he could hear me, but we could never both hear each other in a single gaming session. We tried tweaking some of TeamSound's settings, but nothing helped.

TeamSound must work fine on some computers or it wouldn't be out there. And perhaps version 4.8 (or whatever version TeamSound is up to by the time you read this) might have worked for us, but version 4.5 did not. We moved on to First Contact.

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