Bluetooth headphones + music playback solutions

If you're listening to music with bluetooth headphones and the audio quality sounds poor, it's probably because your bluetooth headphones are in "call mode." In call mode, your headphones are optimized for conversation as opposed to listening to music so music sounds pretty compressed and terrible. Here are two solutions.

Use a different mic

The simplest workaround is to adjust adjust your Tandem audio input (or you can change your default mic at the system level) so you don't use the mic from your bluetooth headphones. Using your build-in laptop mic is a great option. That frees your bluetooth headphones to disconnect from call mode and playback music at optimal sound quality while other people can still hear you speak.

Toggle bluetooth music mode on

On a per call basis, if you click on the caret in the upper right hand corner of the speaker icon you'll see an option to turn on Bluetooth music mode. This allows you to use the same bluetooth device for your speaker and mic, but deactivates your mic when you mute yourself so you can hear music properly.

In practice, this means that when you're unmuted and speaking to your teammates, music will sound bad but as soon as you mute, music will return to proper fidelity. There is a bit of a lag with muting and unmuting when using this setting.

Mic bleeding (in Music Rooms) solutions

This is specific to Tandem's Music rooms which use Spotify's API to synchronize the Spotify apps on each of your teammates' computers.

Because we use Spotify's API, music isn't being streamed from the DJ's computer to the other computers in the room. However, if one of your teammates aren't using headphones and their mic is active, the music coming out from their speakers COULD be streamed to your computer which would cause you to hear the music twice.

The solution here is to make sure that your teammate either has their mic turned off or uses headphones to listen to music.