Live-share: Use discord voice channel

[mittalyashu]

Discord is gaining quite popularity in open source projects _(React, Vue.js, Nuxt.js)_ and I really like their Audio channel feature to talk with other people.

As @lostintangent mentioned here, that VS Live Audio Share is currently using Skype under the hood, that's good, but integration with discord will enchane at whole new level.

How discord integration can improve this?

Current scenrio

We create a Live Share session, people start joining and then we can start an audio conversation among those people.

Using discord audio channel

There are two ways we can use discord audio channels.

1. If we have already created audio channel in our discord server then we have to just connect to one of the channel from VS Code and then we are good to talk with the people in that channel.
2. We create a new Live Share session, people start joining and then we start an audio channel _(this will create a temporary audio channel in discord server (not sure if this is possible))_ and the people joining live share can also join the audio channel, apart from that more people can also join the same audio channel directly from discord server.

Along with this feature request https://github.com/karigari/vscode-chat/issues/91, it's an win, win.

[lostintangent]

@mittalyashu Thanks for the feedback! One of the reasons we didn’t initially support chat is because we recognize that everyone has their own preferred solution (for both voice and text). The goal of the Live Share Audio extension is to provide a lightweight voice option for users that don’t already have a shared voice chat solution, or when it’s easier for them to just spin up a chat via Live Share. It’s not our goal to turn it into a general purpose audio chat solution (like the “Slack chat” extension is trying to do for text chat), and so this request is out of scope for our near term plans.

Out of curiosity: for your use case, would it be sufficient to just use Discord chat + Live Share?

[mittalyashu]

Out of curiosity: for your use case, would it be sufficient to just use Discord chat + Live Share?

Yeah, it can work, but I am interested in this 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

We create a new Live Share session, people start joining and then we start an audio channel _(this will create a temporary audio channel in discord server (not sure if this is possible))_ and the people joining live share can also join the audio channel, apart from that more people can also join the same audio channel directly from discord server.

So, that we can avoid juggling between the applications _(VS Code and Discord)_.

[lostintangent]

@mittalyashu So you'd expect to have people join the audio call that aren't actually part of the Live Share session?

[mittalyashu]

So you'd expect to have people join the audio call that aren't actually part of the Live Share session?

Yes.

Explaining in detail

All the people who have joined the live share can obvisouly join the voice channel.

Apart from that, if a member from Discord server wants to join the voice channel _(created by VS Code)_

In the server I have set different premissions _(for example)_:

1. Boss
2. Lead Dev
3. Junior Dev
4. Visitors

and I set the premission, that only premission with Lead dev can join the call.

Not to forget, that the host can remove anyone from voice call 😂.

[lostintangent]

@mittalyashu Makes sense, thanks for the detail!

[neico]

If you bring Group DM's into this context as well then this adds a whole different level to it, (I guess technically this can be applied to skype as well)
You spoke of live share creating a channel, alternatively opening a group DM (or joining) sounds more reasonable for most cases as it doesn't require any extra permission management etc.

With the added bonus that people can turn the audio chat into a video chat anytime (which includes screen sharing, which could lead to some very dynamic collaboration especially with live share not having support for shared UI debugging yet, or simply pointing things out that requires to see the hosts mouse cursor)

And quite a few people that use discord don't even have skype installed anymore (I'm actually unsure if skype needs to be installed for the extension to work, haven't tried it yet due to this extension being VSCode only for now, while I primarily use VS2017), which is quite a factor in usability of the audio extension.
All it needs is to detect discord and handle some API calling to bring people together.

[lostintangent]

@neico The audio extension doesn’t require Skype to be installed, and you don’t need to have a Skype account either. The fact that it uses Skype behind the scenes is a bit of an implementation detail, since it’s initial purpose is to simply provide a friction-free way of adding a voice call to a Live Share session.

[mittalyashu]

If you bring Group DM's into this context as well then this adds a whole different level to it, (I guess technically this can be applied to skype as well)
You spoke of live share creating a channel, alternatively opening a group DM (or joining) sounds more reasonable for most cases as it doesn't require any extra permission management etc.

@neico, I am not sure how Skype works, since I haven't used it.

But, regarding this feature, it should be implemented becuase there are many open source projects are using Discord for building their community, in that case it will help many developers to get more quickly and easily.

[Nhoya]

Hi, as already mentioned by @lostintangent this is considered out of scope since they want to leave the user the freedom to choose the intended solution.

Moving the voice chat on another service means that the extension will be strongly tied to it. For example, what will happen if the discord service is not available?

Also, what's the point on opening another connection to another server (discord) to connect to the same people you are already connected with (via liveshare)?

[mittalyashu]

Moving the voice chat on another service means that the extension will be strongly tied to it.

Integrating discord voice doesn't mean that skype integration has to be removed. People can choose through which service they want to get connected.

For example, what will happen if the discord service is not available?

Well, I strongly doubt that, since liveshare is using skype under the hood to make the voice feature work and what if skype is not available.

As far I know about Discord their API response time is very good and even if they get any problem if generally get fixed in few minutes _(depending upon the type of problem occured)_. To know more about Discord uptime https://status.discordapp.com/.

Also, what's the point on opening another connection to another server (discord) to connect to the same people you are already connected with (via liveshare)?

If I am not wrong integration with skype works the same way, where they are using skype infrastructure to provide audio calling feature.

I suggest you to read this comment https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/issues/907#issue-356378247.

[Nhoya]

Well, I strongly doubt that, since liveshare is using skype under the hood to make the voice feature work and what if skype is not available.

I used both Discord and skype, and IMHO they are not comparable in quality of service and downtime detected. Also I suspect (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) that the two infrastructures are not comparable...

If I am not wrong integration with skype works the same way, where they are using skype infrastructure to provide audio calling feature.

Sure, if it uses Skype you need to create another connection to the Skype, this last comment was aimed to both the implementations.

This doesn't mean that this can't be done or is not a good Idea, I just think that a P2P for voicechat should be better

[nihaals]

You can use Discord voice by using the Game SDK

[lostintangent]

This doesn’t represent a scenario we’ll likely ever support, so I’m going to close it for now. That said, folks can implement this themselves if they’d like by using our extensibility API. I’d love to see someone contribute this!