Can't get rid of audio problems, tried EVERYTHING! seriously

[brian1711]

Well, I got my magicjack about a week ago and have been having some problems with it. I pretty much dedicated today to trying to fix it and figure it out before giving up on it, and I have run out of things to try and figured I will make my own post to see if someone out there has any ideas for my specific situation.

Note: I've called myself way too many times between my cell phone and my magicjack for testing, so I have heard both sides of the "conversation" for all of this.

The problem: About 20% of the time when I make a call using my magicjack, there is some sort of "choppiness" going on with the audio. Either the MJ phone stutters, the cell phone stutters, or both do. Sometimes, one voice will completely not get heard while the other one is fine.

About 50% of the time when I receive a call on my magicjack, there is some sort of major choppiness going on with the audio. Also, it is fairly often that some aspect of the call (voice or speaker) will be nonexistent on one end of the phone.

I really think this is something that should be fixable, because the times it is working, it works perfectly and sounds great. Also, when a call isn't "good" it does not improve no matter how long I wait. I have to hang up and try again. Also, I can make 6 calls in about 2 minutes and one will be bad, the next perfect, the next bad, the next 2 perfect... I also have cable internet with bandwidth that is pretty solid. Also, the fact that it works perfectly sometimes makes me think bandwidth isn't the issue.

Here's what I've done so far--

I have tested using a different phone
I changed over to a 6" phone cord
I have tested using the "softphone"
I have tested the MJ on a different computer
I have changed QoS settings so everything network related on the dedicated MJ laptop is top priority
I downloaded the lasted MJ update
I listened to the audio using wireshark - sounds the same
I updated my divx codecs
I tried using different proxies
I hard-wired my laptop into the router rather than using my wireless connection
I have tested it by hard-wiring my laptop directly into my cable modem - still didn't work, must not be the router
I have tried using a powered USB hub
I changed my PC settings to allow for highest performance of background programs

I would say that I might have possibly made it slightly more reliable with some of the "improvements" I've made because I seem to be having better luck with outgoing calls, but incoming calls are still very hit or miss (still about 50/50). I would say through my testing I have eliminated the phone being a factor, the router being a factor, and the PC being a factor. It seems like either I have a bad MJ unit, the MJ service is just problematic, or I have some sort of ISP problem. Although, there are always other possibilities.

Does anyone have any ideas? Keep in mind that incoming calls seem to be so much more problematic...why would that be?

Thanks.

[Matt9876]

(1) Download the new software update 08/07/08.

(2) Also test it on another computer, never got it to work on my Dell laptop but it works on other machines,some drivers like Roxio/Nero clash with MagicJack.

Good luck

[teddy_b]

Well, I believe the problems you described are on MagicJack side, and you can do nothing to address them .

I'm using MJ for longer than a year (just renewed for a 2nd year about a week ago). Last year choppiness has been a problem on about 30-40% of all calls, so I get used to hang up and dial the number again if it happens. If it was an incoming call, the other party in most cases redialed too because they could not hear a thing on the 1st try... I tried a lot of things (including everything that you tried) to improve the audio quality on my side, but finally gave up.

Suddenly, around January or February this year the reliability improved tremendously. There was a big talk on this forum around that time about MJ doing some major hardware/networking updates. Since then, although there were still some calls with chopped audio, they become a rare occasion - I'd say maybe ~3% of all calls. I was very happy with MJ for the last 6 months or so, and renewed without hesitation (just for 1 year however ).

Unfortunately 5 days ago (Wednesday of last week) the "choppiness" problem returned to the last year scale, and since then 30-40% of all calls are bad again. Yesterday I updated to the newest 20080715 version of MJ but that did not help. What seems to help temporarily though is changing the proxy (by finding the one with the higher percentage of successfull calls - you can do that by dialing your own voicemail 10 times in a row). However, this is not a long-term solution - the "good" proxy can get worse in several hours...

Again, there're some references here about MJ updating something on their side, so I really hope the choppiness will go away soon, and service will get back to what it used to be for the last 6 months.

[iz6]

I am in the same boat as you. I have tried everything you have and even bought the Hawking broadband booster, which helped some, but I still get "choppy calls about 70% of the time...30% very good. Im not convinced Iwill renew for my second year

[mb]

Did you test with a simple wired phone?

How many deviccs are providing QoS? (I had to tell my computer to let the router do it all.)

[gillist419]

I have an audio problem as well. I'll get this "choppy" slow motion audio from inbound calls only. I know the other person can hear me well because I have to tell them to call me right back. I'll get this problem about 25% of the time.

I was getting a problem with my caller ID not working but the last update of mj software seamed to fix it. But I'm still having the audio issue once in a while.

I've got MJ running on a freshly installed windows xp sp2 compaq ipaq.