Background Music in Online Games: The Sequel

A lot us are doing a lot more online gaming these days. For the last year, I've been living an hour's drive my from my nearest friend, and two or more hours from the vast majority of people I've traditionally gamed with in person. So I've been online for a while now. This isn't my first time moving my gaming online - it also happened the year I was living in France for the 2014-15 school year - and of course there's been the occasional online game on G+ (R.I.P.) and Discord. All this to say I have quite a bit of experience with these things.

Through all that experience, one problem that remains fucking intractable is that of piping in background music. This has never been especially hard to do in person; I open up my laptop and pull up a song or video. But for some reason, while simulating every other aspect of a TTRPG session is getting increasingly easy and convenient, music remains a singular challenge. I more or less solved the issue in 2015. The advice in that post still works, more or less. I checked yesterday, and while it's a bit dated and some links might need updating, if you squint a little the instructions will do now what they did then.

So why am I writing this post? Well, the computational landscape has changed significantly since 2015. I no longer use Skype, because I find it intolerable, and Hangouts has been slowly torn to pieces and will finally be laid to rest in June. There are other options for online gaming, and they are very good options, but music remains a problem. In this post I'm going to break down what it takes to get music right in an online gaming session, and I'm going to provide an overview of every conferencing tool of which I am aware. As you'll see, while many of these are okay, or at least workable, most solutions available now are unnecessarily kludgy, awkward to coordinate with players, and/or rely on bad or dying software. The other point of this post is to lay out the problem clearly, in the hopes that someone equiped with that information might have a better solution.


Getting it Right

The thing is getting music right in an online game is logistically very complex. It requires:

• The ability to make sure everyone is hearing, more or less, the same music at the same time. This is complicated by the fact that any application that can allow music to be streamed from one person's computer to another, can also implicate the creator in piracy issues. So you get a lot of options that only offer a narrow range of licensed or public domain music, like Roll20's standard offerings. 
• Feedback cancelling. Not everyone uses headsets when they get on voice. I don't use a headset, because I find I get really annoyed with it after an hour or so, and most of my players don't either. Increasingly, voice chat clients are designed to detect and cancel feedback from their own output and prevent echoing. However, they can't do the same for other sources of sound coming out of your computer. Which means if you have an audio source separate from your voice call, you risk generating an echo. Ergo, the best solutions are the ones you can integrate into the call directly.
• Constant, individually-adjustable volume. For music to sound good and without intruding on the conversation, you want it at a low and more or less constant volume. Since everyone has their own audio setup, it's also important that everyone be able to modulate the volume of the music on their own device -- the way you might move closer or further from a speaker.
• Access to a good music library. This ties to the IP issues raised above; while it's easy for everyone, individually, to access a wide range of good music, it's hard to keep that access synced across multiple systems.
• Robust and convenient playback functionality. Basically, it shouldn't be a pain to cue up a new track, loop the current track, or adjust volume on the fly, because those introduce more dead time to your game session while the GM fiddles with the audio. Lots of audio software has native looping support, but again, the problem is sharing the playback from those.

The Options

This is not a complete account of every possible tool but it is a complete account of every tool I know about. I try to avoid for-pay options, and ironically the two I've tried that do cost money -- Zoom and Google Meet -- are kinda meh as far as music is concerned.

Skype: As I mentioned before, I'm not using Skype anymore. I find the call quality and connection stability to have diminished over the years, it eats a surprising amount of processing power, and it's slow. Ironically, I think it's the most compatible with VoiceMeeter besides Hangouts.

Google Hangouts: Probably the least problematic to use with VoiceMeeter, but like every good thing Google has made, they're getting rid of it. Connection stability has taken a dive recently; likely Google is reallocating resources as they sunset hangouts. Enjoy it until June, I guess.

Google Meet: I've used it a bit but do not have my own GSuite account and therefore haven't had a chance to experiment with it. If anyone has, let me know. (EDIT: oh, turns out I have institutional access. Will explore and report back...)

Zoom: Excellent call quality, and natively supports audio sharing from your computer. The problem is it will lower the volume whenever someone else speaks, which creates weird fluctuates and makes for an unpleasant listening experience. Noise-cancelling and cross-talk reduction mean it doesn't play well with VoiceMeeter. I tried piping in audio from a separate computer, but once again the cross-talk reduction got in the way.

Jitsi: Decent quality voice/video conferencing with native YouTube video sharing and supports looping, which would make it the #1 contender, except it mutes the video when it detects someone trying to speak, which defeats the whole purpose.

Discord: There are Discord bots you can use to play music into a voice chat, and I believe users can individually manage volume. The main issue with Discord is its absolutely atrocious call stability; there's always someone having mic or audio issues, random connection drops, you name it. Also, it doesn't seem like the audio bots are compatible with video calls, which makes them a no no for me because I like seeing my friends' faces. If that's not a sticking point, this might be a decent option.

Watch2Gether: Lets you sync up YouTube videos, and supports looping and individual volume control. It's awkward and means navigating to a different tab every time I want to do something with the music, and it creates echo because it runs separate from the voice chat. Still, it provides the least active resistance of any option I've tried so it's what I've settled on. Do I recommend it? Not really. But it's the least bad option for my uses.

Roll20: Roll20 is made for playing RPGs online. It has native audio and video calling, mapping tools, document tracking, macros, a dice roller, and native music streaming. Unfortunately I don't like it. Its default music library is limited to tracks I'm not at all familiar with and don't really like. You can upload your own, if you have them in mp3, but I often don't. The interface is cramped, crowded, and not especially intuitive, demands a lot of buy-in and prep time to use well, and I find it runs badly on less powerful systems. For those with the time and a decent computer, Roll20 is a great all-in-one environment. I am not one of those people, and neither are any of my players.

CyTube: Just found this one while I was writing this post. It's quite good? A tube syncer like Watch2Gether, but way less ugly and irritiating to use. It supports looping, which is done by giving yourself "Leader" status and putting the youtube video on loop. I'm impressed with this one and will try it out in my next game. It will have the same catch as Watch2Gether - a separate audio source -- but otherwise it seems like the lightest and tightest option available. As a final note, it may come a little too close for comfort to the Weird 4chan Ecosystem.

Closing thoughts

There's a lot options and lot of variables. As I think the list above shows, there's no perfect option for every group. Roll20 is pretty good if that suits your group. I'm tired of writing this article. Enjoy your music? Or not.