Anyone tried this? How is it on echo cancellation, VOX, and conference noise rejection?
Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
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Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, used to be in a clan of over 100 people that used it no problem, very few of which were engineers. Not sure what particular functionality held you up?
Setting up the automatic transmission is notoriously causing problems. The lack of echo cancellation and no normalization of audio levels are interfering with discussions as well.
The 1.3 snapshots have echo canceling and normalization.
Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mumble's channel system allows nesting channels, in addition to that, each channel allows specific access control list that could be both inherited from top-level channel or be inherited to a lower-level one. In addition to that it has the possibility of creating groups of users to whom the permission applies. It's really sophisticated. Discord has only role-based rooms, but nothing hierarchical.
I don't have any experience with gaming so this is a bit hard for me to understand. Are nested channels used as a way of grouping channels in a hierarchy in the UI? Or does the hierarchy affect what people hear? In the latter case, I'm imagining something like: "Everyone in subchannel can hear everything said in parent channel, but not vice versa".
Correct. In example, you've got your "logisitics" wing; in this context that's your healers. A commander ("logi-FC") within the channel issues orders to the sub-channel members, and no one outside the channel hears that. All members can still hear the parent channel.
In fights with 20-50 on each side particularly, it's really something to have the "pulse of the fight" because as a healer you can tell how well that's going.
A mumble server can be hosted with fairly low requirements if you're an org with less than 50 members in voice comms, and it's pretty embarrassing that a seemingly large majority of corporations can't even get 5 people into a call without an act of congress when gamers have tools like this so well explored.
Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Skype went from point to point systems to routing through a server backend.
Any idea why? Sounds stupid, considering latency losses and increased server costs.
A lot of people are giving legal reasons but there were real technical ones as well in 2011 that forced the migration.
When skype was first launched 95% of users were on desktop or laptops that basically never got disconnected. Skype leveraged this by designating some users as "super nodes" that basically acted as the backhaul servers that eventually replaced them.
This worked well until mobile phones became prevalent and began to outnumber desktop and laptops on the network.
Mobile phones have two issues:
1) They aren't always on/connected so can't be used as "super nodes," especially because even today mobile phones suck at mulit-tasking, but were even worse back then.
2) Even if 1 wasn't an issue the short battery life of mobile phones meant that they wouldn't last very long.
At a certain point it became impossible to support the increased number of phones with the current infrastructure choices. So they moved to something else.
Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have any experience with gaming so this is a bit hard for me to understand. Are nested channels used as a way of grouping channels in a hierarchy in the UI? Or does the hierarchy affect what people hear? In the latter case, I'm imagining something like: "Everyone in subchannel can hear everything said in parent channel, but not vice versa".
Correct. In example, you've got your "logisitics" wing; in this context that's your healers. A commander ("logi-FC") within the channel issues orders to the sub-channel members, and no one outside the channel hears that. All members can still hear the parent channel. In fights with 20-50 on each side particularly, it's really something to have the "pulse of the fight" because as a healer you can tell how well that's…
That really sounds like an indispensible feature. Is Mumble the only voice chat system that provides this kind of hierarchical linking of channels, or is it available on other systems as well?
If it's not available on, say, Discord, why is that? Do people just somehow make do without it? Or is there some other compensating feature?
Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#86We live and die by Mumble in Eve Online. The hierarchical chat room setup is essential for large fleets.
I still haven't figured out the hierarchical channel structure/channel linking.
The use case I had was if I wanted teamchat/allchat done via different hotkeys, like if I were playing with some friends on an RTS and wanted to talk crap on all while strategizing on team.
Edit: my two cents: I've been running Mumble for a long time, and though it isn't as multi-tooled as TS, I love its simplicity and its quality.
Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#87I still regularly record podcasts via Mumble. It's got solid built-in recording with decent options, such as whether to record users individually or as to record the entire chat as one audio feed. Because we have users drop from time to time, having this built-in capability makes it easy for us to have at least two people on recording duty at any given time. I do take mumble.com up on server hosting, because it's so…
> I do take mumble.com up on server hosting, because it's so dirt cheap
https://www.mumble.com/mumble-server-pricing.php
The cheapest tier is 90 $ for 24 months, i.e. 3.75 per month. That buys me nearly two entire virtual servers.
Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I vaguely recall experimenting with Mumble years ago - my biggest gripe was the lack of support for anything other certificate based user authentication which complicates the common case of "User X would like to be able to access Mumble from multiple machines".
You can export and import certificate files across machines. I've done something like this in the past, and found little issue. I prefer this to something like Discord's centralized account & server system, although I know there should be better alternatives for achieving decentralization.
Most common users aren't even aware this is a thing, let alone how a CA or Certificate works. So there the setup stops, because certificates are foreign and scary to some users. Discord? Just a e-mail / username / password login like any other online service.
It's a huge tripping point in Mumble, and for sure holds it back from use.
Re: Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mumble's channel system allows nesting channels, in addition to that, each channel allows specific access control list that could be both inherited from top-level channel or be inherited to a lower-level one. In addition to that it has the possibility of creating groups of users to whom the permission applies. It's really sophisticated. Discord has only role-based rooms, but nothing hierarchical.
I don't have any experience with gaming so this is a bit hard for me to understand. Are nested channels used as a way of grouping channels in a hierarchy in the UI? Or does the hierarchy affect what people hear? In the latter case, I'm imagining something like: "Everyone in subchannel can hear everything said in parent channel, but not vice versa".
The hierarchy can be set up to affect what people hear, and where they can speak. This is invaluable when you need to coordinate dozens or hundreds of players in real time. You can set up overlapping rooms where team leads hear their team member's voice chatter and their superior's voice chatter, and have the option of communicating in either direction. I usually had the two side buttons on my mouse set to push-to-talk, one that for talking up the hierarchy, one for talking downward. The exact setup everyone uses varies, but at minimum you can have a room for higher-level voice chat among team leads, while each lowest-level team is isolated to their own channel and can focus on the tasks given to them by their team lead. Mumble is also flexible enough that you don't need to strictly adhere to a hierarchy, you can have your lower-level players also be able to communicated laterally to groups of specialists who are handling specific support tasks.
This is all a difficult communication problem, but it's doubly difficult because decisions need to propagate up and down your communication hierarchy in seconds. Being able to manage this level of communication without it being a hopeless clusterfuck is a defining feature of effective organizations of players.