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Summary: If you're behind a router and/or the person you want to talk to is behind a router you can have problems with audio in MSN Instant Messenger. Why can't I have an Audio conversation using MSN Messenger? For what it's worth ... neither can I. But I know why. One of the very common devices in use these days is the broadband router. These boxes allow you to connect one or more computers to your high speed internet connection. Besides letting more than one computer share a single connection to the internet, broadband routers are one of the safest ways to connect because of a technology called "Network Address Translation" or NAT. • Using NAT, your computer is effectively "hidden" behind your router. For example, each computer will be assigned a private IP or network address that works only behind the router. When that computer then communicates across the internet that Network Address gets Translated to a real, publicly visible internet address. It's safe because from the internet side of the router there's no way to initiate contact with any computers on the private side (unless the router has been explicitly configured to allow certain types of contact). Unfortunately that means that some communications protocols which try to send the address of computer A behind a NAT router over to computer B somewhere on the internet are destined to fail. They'll send the private address computer A has been assigned, which computer B not being on the private network cannot use. And so it is with MSN Messenger's Audio (as well as Video and as I understand it, file transfer) protocols. They apparently transmit the IP addresses of both sides of the conversation in ways that NAT routers don't know how to translate. So if there's a NAT anywhere in-between the conversation can't happen. Microsoft Support has a knowledgebase article that gives essentially the same overview, though their discussion is limitted to Windows 2000 Internet Connection Sharing as the NAT router. (Step one of their "workaround" is to install a proxy server instead, which is no small amount of work.) Whether you're using Windows internet connection sharing or some other type of NAT router the concepts and the resulting problem are the same. MSN also has a known issues article for Messenger which mentions the NAT problem near the bottom. So for now those of us behind NAT routers are safe, but at the cost of not being able to use the audio and video features of Messenger. It's my understanding though I've not confirmed is that some other instant messaging products such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) may use a different protocol and hence may not be affected by this issue. You can learn much more about NAT here. Related Links:
• Recent Comments
Hey Leo I really hope you can help me out here. I have tried everything. My MSN works fine no problems. However when I try to have an Audio Conversation the problem starts. The person I am talking to can't hear my voice. Instead they here the music I am playing on my computer or the sounds my computer is playing (Which I can hear too). I can hear the other person though.I have tested my microphone using the computers software and the MSN audio wizard and it doesn't work. It detects the microphone and I have tested the microphone on another computer and it works fine. Can you please help me. Thanks alot Posted by: Abu-Bakar Akram at September 29, 2007 06:36 AMmsn says cannot run audio and video set up..up untill a few days ago it was fine..i can send my cam to others on other sites ..just not msn..please help I had the "We are unable to run Audio and Video setup" popup too, but I managed to fix it :) It was just that I was running Messenger in Windows 2000 compatibility mode. Disabling the compatibility mode so it ran natively under XP made it work :) to pat....i done wat you said but it still shows me that msg sayin "We are unable to run Audio and Video setup" ......any tips to help? Posted by: spud at November 11, 2007 02:52 AMhi, while talking on msn, i can hear my friend for most of what he says, but occasionally at the end of a longer sentence there is a big gap before his voice comes back, it's as if he is only able to speak in monosylables or else msn has trouble sending voice between our computers. Could it be his sound card? or would it be that i am using a router with a nat firewall? do you know if msn have released any fixes for this problem? if so where are they available? Can't get audio when on msn messenger. My old web cam works no bother but my new one won't. Strange. If i video myself the audio will work, so the mic is working but when i go on to msn it stops! Can anyone help. I have re-installed msn plus the cam. Posted by: Darren MCClure at December 26, 2007 09:11 AM"We are unable to run Audio and Video setup why? nothing works :( have read your article and have the same problem camera and mic work fine untill on messenger have tried to alter the connection settings but unable as isp has been set up using a lan connection can anyone help hello,i have a prob with msn, i can not get any sound comming out at all, can you help me with that, please get back to me regards steve. Posted by: steve at February 5, 2008 10:50 PMI can speak for about a minute then white noise cuts into my audio output, only happens when my friends are talking to me every audio check I do works fine doesn't matter which microphone I use (I've tried 3 different ones, could it be my service provider? Posted by: Heather Carey at April 20, 2008 09:53 PMPost a comment on "Why can't I have an Audio conversation using MSN Messenger?":
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