I use Google Voice to make and receive phone calls on my Macintosh MacBook Air. I've found that after being on the phone for 29 minutes and ~45 seconds, the other party starts to hear me as garbled, I can continue to hear them fine. Hanging up and calling back immediately resolves the issue.
Searching the net, I see many people have had this problem such as this posting going back to 2009. The issue appears to have come about starting with OS X v10.5.7. I'm using Mountain Lion. I've also read Apple keeps pointing the finger at 3rd parties. I've seen this explanation on a Skype support ticket where in they state it is a third party issue:
On Mac OS X 10.5.6 & prior, the USB audio driver publishes 2 audio engines, one for input stream and another for output stream. Applications could change sample rate on one audio stream without affecting the other stream. On 10.5.7 & onwards, a change in the USB audio driver publishes only 1 audio engine for both input & output streams. Changing sample rate on one stream will affect another stream (technically, the sample rate resides on the audio engine, so changing the sample rate naturally affects both streams). So in this case, changing the sample rate causes the input stream to run at a different rate that originally when Ventrilo launched. Ventrilo doesn't handle the sample rate change properly, resulting in the audio corruption (robotic/garbled, etc).
(a) This problem actually could occur on Mac OS X 10.5.6, depending on the USB audio device used. If the device can only support one sample rate, then this problem will also occur after the USB audio driver switches the sample rate on both streams when it detected one stream is falling behind. (b) This problem is not specific to USB audio driver. Using Ventrilo for example with Firewire audio device also exhibits similar issue. The Firewire audio driver also puts input & output audio stream on the same audio engine.
In conclusion, this is a 3rd party application developer issue. Ventrilo (& other programs such as Mumble) need to listen to and handle sample rate change properly.
What third party application is at fault here when using Google Voice from GMail? How would I get the responsible party to fix their software?
