How to audio chat with Windows users?

[macrem]

I've been using Skype, but find it to be a huge resource hog.

Has anyone successfully gotten audio chats with a Windows user working via iChat or Adium? Or another efficient app? If so, please advise.

I seem to find many claims that it works (e.g., with yahoo) followed by claims it doesn't. My experience is it doesn't work.

 

[devburke]

It generally depends on three things:

a) the IM client you're using
b) the IM client the other person's using
c) the chat protocol (AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, etc)

To be able to audio chat, all three of these must be compatible with audio chatting (note that it does NOT depend on the OS). I don't know if Adium does audio chats, but I know it doesn't do video. I know iChat does both. I don't know if Yahoo supports audio chatting, as I only use AIM (which does support it) and Google Talk (which, I believe, does not...although I think they added video chatting in-browser lately, so I'm not sure about that).

If everything's compatible and it's still not working, then I'm not sure what the problem is. My video chats kept failing lately, so I searched under help and found that having Internet Sharing turned on can mess it up.

So basically, make sure that both clients and the protocol support audio chatting, and you should be good to go, barring a more complicated problem.

 

[drichards]

Skype works great, iChat (aim) is flawless. MSN just broke and Yahoo beta is... well its beta. Adium doesn't support voice or video. Ventrilo and Teamspeak rock. Paltalk gets better every day on the mac.

I'm sure I missed a few ways to voice chat, but whatever. You can find your own downloads if you need to.

 

[macrem]

Thanks for the great info & advice devburke & drichards.

I agree Skype works well, it just seems to use a lot of system resources (25-30% of CPU & RAM). Don't know if true or not but heard Skype shares some of your bandwidth too.

I'll ask my gf so we can try: AIM (Win client) <-> AIM (server) <-> iChat (Mac client).

 

[fpbecker]

So far I know of two apps which allow audio chat with Windows users: Skype and Yahoo! Messenger.

I'm hoping for Adium to have voice/video capabilities at some point in time though.

 

[macrem]

We just tried AIM as mentioned above. It works, but the sound quality is inferior to Skype, meanwhile iChat uses more system resources than Skype while an audio connection is open.

 

[macrem]

I stopped using YIM because my account gets flooded with spam. Whenever I log in the screen is filled with messages and I don't have time to sift through all of them to see if a real friend tried to reach me. I've tried setting it to ignore spam but it goes back to default after logging out. I use Adium, maybe the YIM client works better.