[David]

Very much this, it takes time to recapture the microphone and it's really annoying to lose the first part of what you say every time you unmute. I lead the video team at a videoconferencing app (gather.town) and we keep the microphone active when you mute for this reason.

As seems to be pretty common, for the sake of privacy we do stop sending audio to the media server. That's a tradeoff, since we're still susceptible to losing a little bit while the audio connection resumes.

Edit: as others have mentioned, also useful to keep bluetooth headsets in two-way audio mode rather than reverting to audio output mode, since that's really disruptive.

[jimmygrapes]

Just throwing it out there but maybe to avoid bandwidth spikes that might lead to latency depending on the setup, could you inject some kind of easily identifiable "is muted" signal along with white noise in place of silences? or would that sort of pre-mixing be too slow to do in real time on the client side?

[sillysaurusx]

Shoutout to gathertown. Love what you’re doing.