Ventrilo - Ducking (Windows 7 or newer)

Overview

Ducking is an audio industry term used to describe what happens when an announcer or DJ is speaking while music or some other type sound is playing in the background. The act of "Ducking" is to lower the volume of background sound so that the announcer / DJ can be heard more clearly. When they have finished speaking the background sound volume is restored to its previous level.

Ventrilo supports Ducking when using Windows 7 or newer Operating Systems. When activated it can be used to lower the sound coming from games or music players whenever a voice stream is coming in from another user or if you are transmitting to other users.

Note: Some programs will behave differently when ducking is activated. Windows Media Player (WMP) will pause playing until the ducking is deactivated. Other programs like WinAmp and iTunes will have their volume attenuated.

You must NOT run the Ventrilo client in compatibility mode. Otherwise you will not be able to activate the ducking support. There is no reason to run Ventrilo in compatibility mode anyway.

Allow ducking when...

The following options control when the client will activate ducking.

Enabled

When checked this will enable the Ducking feature for the following options.

Transmitting (XMIT)

When enabled ducking will be activated while you are transmitting to other Users.

Receiving voice stream

When enabled ducking will be activated while receiving a voice stream from other Users.

Text To Speech (TTS)

When enabled ducking will be activated while a TTS message is being played by the Ventrilo client.

Wave files

When enabled ducking will be activated while a wave file is being played by the Ventrilo client.

Milliseconds before restoring volume

This value specifies the number of milliseconds the program will wait after all Ducking events have completed before the program will restore the volume levels. The value must be 100 or higher. A millisecond is 1/1000 of a second. Whereas a value of 100 translates to .1 seconds or a tenth of a second. Please note that ALL of the events specified above must have completed before the delay timer kicks in. If you have entered a value of 10000 and another User starts talking 3 seconds after the previous person has completed talking then the sound will remain "ducked" until the new User has completed talking at which point the timer will be activated again. Any sound event that would cause the system to be "ducked" will reset the timer.

System Communication (Ducking) Panel

This button will open the Windows Sound Communications Panel (Figure 1). From there you can tell the system how ducking should be handled such as lowering the volume by 80%, 50%, completely muted or Do Nothing.

Note: While this panel is a recommendation how a program / sound should be "ducked" it does not mean that all programs will handle it the exact same way. For example, WinAmp will have its sound effected as you specified in this panel, but Windows Media Player may chose to pause the sound stream entirely until the system is "unducked".

Figure 1