Why can't you hear people sing when playing online?!

[Hypnoz]

I was looking forward to hearing people attempt to sing some of these songs but online you can't hear anyone sing (Unless they are using your mic).

Whats up with that?

[KingNuclear]

They can.

put a piece of tape over your LT or RT = wallah, they can hear you sing.


-Nuke-

[mdouet]

Because the lag is horrible (as much as 1 sec latency), but like the above poster said they can force it by holding the shoulder buttons on their controller, it really sounds like ass though.

[emkajeej]

people who say "wallah" should endure something unpleasant. like an onion falling on their heads

[Spooky73]

My unerstanding is that you only need to hold down ONE shoulder button, but the last post is correct, it sounds awful. It is bascially just your "chat" mic (no reverb or effects to smooth out your voice) and the original vocal track is still there for others so they can barely hear you anyway.

[Nate Finch]

-----Note------
The above is for 360 only. Can't do it at all for PS3.
----------------


The reason for the "lag" I presume, is to ensure enough delay in the game that the actual interaction with the other players won't be laggy. Unfortunately, with voice data, it's more difficult because there's like 1000x as much data to pass around.

So, yeah, it's a bummer, but necessary for online play (at least at the moment).

[Bakkster]

The reason for the "lag" I presume, is to ensure enough delay in the game that the actual interaction with the other players won't be laggy. Unfortunately, with voice data, it's more difficult because there's like 1000x as much data to pass around.

So, yeah, it's a bummer, but necessary for online play (at least at the moment).

Not quite. It's just part of the internet. ANY packet (no matter how small) takes time to travel The Tubes. If you are REALLY lucky, this might be as low as 30ms, but 100ms is generally considered good for gaming. Now imagine that your singers audio plays 100ms late. This is a huge problem that people are having locally, and it forces them to turn their own audio off to be able to play properly. Now imagine that the lag can increase to as much as 1s and you have rendered the game unplayable while you hear the singer.

It would be possible to have the singer start 1s early, but then every other band member's mistakes get delayed by 1.1s or more, which also isn't a great solution. Simply removing voice chat seems to have been the best solution. Until there is a lag-free internet (aka, never) we won't have real-time singing over the internet.

[CyN1caL]

Until there is a lag-free internet (aka, never) we won't have real-time singing over the internet.

There already is a real-time internet.


It's called "real life" :p

[Nate Finch]

Well, I know there's lag in any online game, but they manage to get around it for the rest of the instruments, where a 100ms lag-time would be death to the song as well. My assumption is that they stagger the start times on the songs so that they can queue up some data and keep lag from interrupting anything. The only reason voice would be any different is that it is several orders of magnitude more information to pass around. For the other instruments, you only need to pass around data like "drummer hit red & blue at 1.03 seconds into the song" which is really small and therefore requires much less time to transfer than streaming high-quality sound.

[Bakkster]

Well, I know there's lag in any online game, but they manage to get around it for the rest of the instruments, where a 100ms lag-time would be death to the song as well. My assumption is that they stagger the start times on the songs so that they can queue up some data and keep lag from interrupting anything. The only reason voice would be any different is that it is several orders of magnitude more information to pass around. For the other instruments, you only need to pass around data like "drummer hit red & blue at 1.03 seconds into the song" which is really small and therefore requires much less time to transfer than streaming high-quality sound.

Watch carefully in a score duel, and you will see the other player's score increase about 500ms after the note is done. If you miss a note online, the other players just see the note 500ms (or however far) later get missed instead. Scoring is based on the local score, not on the delayed representation. This is how they avoid it for the instruments.

The reason you can not do this with vocals is the game doesn't have audio of you singing yet. On guitar or drums the game just needs to decide whether or not to play the audio, and if it is 500ms late, it's not a huge deal. The other players can't hear you singing until your audio reaches them, though.

They could stagger the instruments to start after the vocalist, so the audio would reach them in time with the music, but:
1) If your lag increases, the audio will skip and stutter.
2) Now the singer has an even bigger time before they know if the other players are making mistakes.

[Hypnoz]

Couldn't they just delay the vocals 1 second for everyone else? Maybe im missing something here....

[Nate Finch]

*shrug* It's a complicated thing, this real-time online gaming. I'm sure they tried to get live vocals working online.... obviously that's what everyone would prefer. Evidently there were some substantial obstacles they couldn't overcome.

[mdouet]

Has anyone tried doing backup vocals while playing an instrument, does that work and if so is it as laggy as the singer's voice?

[Bakkster]

Has anyone tried doing backup vocals while playing an instrument, does that work and if so is it as laggy as the singer's voice?

Yes and yes.