Should we use Mumble?
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009We’ve been hearing lots of good things about a voice comms package (open source) called Mumble. We know a few communities that use it already. With our Ventrilo server expiring shortly I thought it worth looking at this, pro clans are moving to it due to it’s extremely low latency and high quality audio. I found a couple of videos on the subject, take a look below. We’ll run a little trial withit a month before expiry and take a vote.
“Mumble is a voice chat application for groups. It has low latency and superb voice quality. While it can be used for any kind of activity, it is primarily intended for gaming. It features an ingame overlay for DX9 and OpenGL based games, showing clearly who is talking even for fullscreen applications.”
UKGame are offering an excellent three month free trial of it and remarkable pricing (since it’s open source). Check it out -> Mumble Hosting UK (Hmph, we should get a free server just for the endorsement I reckon 
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I love Mumble – disclosure: I host it commercially as well, but anyone using Mumble is good for me even if they never use my services.
Honestly, if you’re going to mess with it… check out the 1.2 strain (which officially went into “alpha” testing yesterday-ish). The majority of the complaints people had with Mumble are addressed in 1.2. The new CELT codec is great, at 96kbps it still uses very little CPU and the quality is good enough you can stream music over it without too many complaints.
The interface has made huge leaps and bounds from 1.1.8 as well, so I’d definitely recommend you check that out if you can find a place to get a 1.2 alpha server hosted.