👨🏻💻Microsoft to add Music Mode in Teams
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Happy Monday Everyone ⚡️☕️
If like hundreds of thousands of working professionals around the world, your week begins with a slew of video conference calls on Zoom/Google Meet/Microsoft Teams or any such similar tool, we may have news that could be music to your ears 🎶
Silicon Valley Tech Giant and nearing the elusive $2 Trillion market cap, Microsoft is planning to roll out ‘Music Mode’ for its video conferencing tool it calls ‘ Teams ‘
While Teams may have rolled out in 2017, much like many other video conferencing tools, it had an insane 2020, thanks to the pandemic and the shift to Work-From-Home for most businesses.
With a 700% increase YOY in revenue, raking in a cool approximated $6.8 Billion in 2020, with more than 500,000 organizations using it as their preferred communication tool, it added 95 Million users in 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing apps of the year 🚀
It also managed to thwart off the dominant position held by Slack,- the Silicon Valley darling product for all things business text chat, as a convenient alternative to email.
Especially after the pandemic, Slack has simply been no match for Teams in terms of the number of Daily Active Users 👇🏻
So despite having this dominating position in the formal communications space, what is Microsoft planning to do with adding Music Mode in Teams?
And what is Music Mode in the first place?
Music might not be the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to Teams, but as people continue to communicate remotely, it’s possible that they try to share different experiences over the web.
Users could want to share a concert over Teams for consumers or set up hold-music on a Teams meeting or call, the kind one usually listens to when calling a corporate office ☎️
So how would it work?
According to the feature description in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, Teams will support up to 32 kHz sampling rate mono audio at 128 kbps bandwidth.
Moreover, the Teams’ development team will optimize the audio processing settings for reproducing music with high fidelity 🎧
While it may claim to be High-Fidelity, a topic you might want to check out in one of our previous newsletters, Microsoft’s 32 kHz is still not up to the mark of music streaming service Tidal, which prides itself as one of the best audio quality streaming services out there 👇🏻
The video conferencing service will automatically adjust the audio bitrate based on your network connection and will go as low as 48 kbps.
But does this difference actually matter? Not really.
Microsoft says you’ll need good quality audio gear to get the most out of this new feature as a host.
On its roadmap, it says 👇🏻
“To benefit from this improved fidelity, professional microphones and headphones or high-quality external loudspeakers are ideal (no Bluetooth headsets).
Built-in microphones and speakers on laptops such as the Surface Book will also deliver a good experience,”
Users can also choose to turn off features such as echo cancellation and noise suppression and gain control if needed.
So when is this going to be launched?
While there’s no specific ETA on the roadmap by Microsoft, the feature is currently in the works and they hope to make music mode available sometime this month.
As far as the availability is concerned, you could expect music mode in Teams’ desktop app. It remains to be seen if music mode will eventually make its way to the mobile version of Teams.
It’ll be interesting to see how the feature actually pans out, who wouldn’t want to turn up those draggy video calls with some music right? 🎸
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Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com.
