Our clan has been using Mumble (of which the server version is named Murmur) for a few months, and I think it’s time to do a review on it.
Mumble is a low latency (read “doesn’t take much from your computer or internet”) voice over internet protocol (VOIP) client. It is fully open source unlike common alternatives like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. This means that it’s not only free for you to host your own unlimited slot server, but the hosting is much much cheaper if you don’t want to do it yourself (pay 18c USD every month per slot, no long term and I choose the amount of slots). No, it does not look as good as its competitors (its default skin is grey and white), but it is feature full and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The voice codecs used in Mumble are experimental. They sound as good as Skype (the best quality of internet voice chat), but takes up almost no bandwidth or CPU. There is no echo made in voice trasit, which is amaizngly close to instant. It is literally the best VOIP program I have used, ever.
The layout is very standard and can be changed. There is a type box (where you can post links and small pictures to either a select person, a select channel, or everyone), and a list of rooms you can join. Each room can have a description (as customized by the admin) with pictures and links. Other things admins can do is set up a message that appears when logging on to the server as well as ban, move, and mute users.
There are many options in Mumble, including an in-game overlay that shows who is talking that you can customize the posision of, quality of sound depending on your internet connection, key bindings, and a set-up wizard to guide you through making everything sound as good as possible. You may use custom skins in Mumble, but there are not very many quality ones out at the moment.
Mumble is made for gaming. With that in mind, the Mumble developers do everything they can to make your voice chat a part of your game, not a hassle. With that in mind, the Mumble team has created plugins for certain games that enable you to hear only those around you from the direction they are in relation to you, at a volume relative to how far away others are. Though I have never tried this out, this would add a huge new layer into your favorite games, especially FPSs.
If you would like to try out Mumble, or are looking for people to play with, you can try our public Mumble server.
- Download Mumble at http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Main_Page
- Adress: mumble.dotgamerclan.com
- Port: 31089
- Slots: 50
- We are now on the public list under North America as Dot Gamer Clan’s VOIP Server
If you are looking for a good, cheap Mumble server / Murmur host, check out our Command Channel review!
I’m so psyched you like Mumble – I really feel like it’s a great product, and if I had my way it’d blow up and I’d do nothing but hack around on it all day.
I just thought I’d mention that only the CELT codec is currently experimental as far as I know – Speex (which Mumble still uses in certain bandwidth scenarios, and it uses for de-noising and such) is pretty stable I believe. Like I tell everyone who talks about Mumble, anyone who gave it a shot during 1.1.x and didn’t like it should really give 1.2.x a shot – it’s come a long way.
Finally, I implore you to give positional audio a shot if you have headphones and a game that supports it. You’ll need at least one other person to enable it (it won’t do anything if the people you’re talking to don’t have it enabled as well), you might need to play with the settings, and I’ve found the effect more convincing with headphones on – but it’s neat. I thought it was gimmicky for a while and didn’t use it for the entire two years or so I’ve been using Mumble… but then we tried it on TF2 about a month or so ago and the effect is quite astounding!
Maybe I read something outdated about Speex being fairly new and experimental. As a free to play gamer it’s hard to find games that support it and are free. I actually don’t think there are any but punk-buster enabled games that hate me for some reason that I am not aware of. I would actually prefer it for a game like Nexuiz, that is also open source, though it may be a little too fast paced for it to have the full effect of the positional audio. Correct me if I’m wrong, though. I would love to try it out!
Great review man. I’ll definitely be checking it out. My gaming group has been having all kinds of issues with Vent these last few months. Time for us to move on once we’re out of contract.
-smitty
http://commandchannel.com/
No contract, 0.18 a slot, your choice of slots, pay monthly, constant uptime. Amazing what they have going over there. And thanks ^-^.
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Mumble is – simply put – a terrible piece of software. The server component is buggy and doesn’t allow the SuperUser to add / change / delete channels under some conditions. The only way to fix, is a complete re-install. The login process is unintuitive, and users can’t user many characters for login names. Terrible. Junk. Rather use TeamSpeak or Vent.
Really? I’ve never had a problem. Though I do agree that a better admin menu would be nice. Either way, I love the sound quality of Mumble vs TS and Vent, and the overlay is god when playing a multiplayer game.
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