Patent ID: 9602295
Date: 2017-03-21
CPC Classifications: H04L,H04M

Claim:
1. An audio conferencing server that facilitates free form multi-party conversations between users, said audio conferencing server comprising: a plurality of gateway elements, each gateway element in two-way communication with at least one of a plurality of user computers; a plurality of mixing elements, each gateway element in two-way communication with at least one of the mixing elements over a persistent control connection and a dynamic audio connection and each mixing element in two-way communication with at least one other mixing element over a persistent control connection and a dynamic audio connection; a control element in two-way communication with each of the plurality of gateway elements, each of the plurality of mixing elements, and each of the plurality of user computers over persistent control connections, the control element dynamically creating and removing the logical connections to distribute a workload among said plurality of mixing elements by dynamically creating and removing dynamic audio connections between the mixing elements and between the mixing elements and the gateway elements while maintaining the persistent control connections; at least one source computer from the plurality of user computers, the source computer providing a source audio stream to one of said plurality of gateway elements, one of said plurality of mixing elements receiving said source audio stream from said one of said plurality of gateway elements; and one of said plurality of mixing elements performing a mixing function on said source audio stream to form an audio stream mix comprising a plurality of output audio streams using said at least one source audio stream; and at least one destination computer from the plurality of user computer, the destination computer receiving said audio stream mix from said one of said plurality of mixing elements performing a mixing function on said source audio stream; wherein the mixing function performed by the one of the plurality of mixing elements comprises adjusting sound settings for at least one of the output audio streams independent of the other output audio streams based on a mix list or three-dimensional position received from the destination computer.