Audio and video solution with “whisper” support

Question

For our online gaming sessions we use Fantasy Grounds as our virtual table top. We’ve also tried a number of other solutions that work to a certain extent but without fully support all our needs which are as follow:

1. Voice and video.
2. Ability to stream my own music from iTunes
3. Ability to speak (whisper) only to one of the players.
4. Good audio quality.

So far, we’ve tried:

1. Discord + Voicemeeter: no whisper, bad music quality. Excellent video and voice.
2. Ts + Voicemeeter. No whisper, no video. Excellent music and voice quality.
3. Roll20. Bad experience, only preuploaded music. Normal video and audio and whisper support.

Currently we are using Roll20 + Ts + Voicemeeter. This meets all the requirements but is a complicated setup, with normal audio and video quality.

Note: The reason for whisper functionality is that, occasionally, group will split and they’ll see and hear different things... sometimes the player themselves prefer other players not to know what exactly has happened.

How can I use these tools to make the setup simpler, and improve audio/video quality?

Answer 1

So I participate in a couple of games that are run online, and we have quite similar requirements to what you have(though we do not have a video requirement). What we do is -

• We use Roll20 for the ease of showing maps, making rolls both public and private as well as some quick gm whispers as well as allow for some ambient background music. (We do not use its voice and video chat in any manner)

• Use a discord server for our voice chats. This allows the party to split-up for a short duration where the GM can hop between two(or more) channels depending on how the party split up and deal with them individually without one group knowing whats happening to the other. This also allows us to use a simple bot to play music/soundbites as needed. (We also use a bot to record our sessions in case the gm or players want to go over the recordings to brush up on what happened or to confirm any hunches they get later on)

This has been working for us for over 2 years now and I believe that discord supports video as well, so this setup should work for you.

Answer 2

Use Discord. It has everything you need already.

Create a server with two or more voice rooms, and swap between them as needed for the scenes. You can put a limit on how many people can access each room or set permissions for each one to control who can enter where, too.

Using Discord, you can also selectively mute or deafen people as needed, by right-clicking their names:

Lastly, but not least, use Rythm instead of Voicemeeter for your music. While it can't be attached to iTunes, you can plug it on any non-private video on YouTube, which simplifies a lot of things. If you want to use your own music without making it public, you can upload the tracks to an unlisted video and feed the URLs to Rythm for it to play.