Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat

Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by IntelMiner on Sunday June 27, 2021 @07:29AM (#27650665)

Hosting a Mumble server is the easy part

Convincing everyone else involved to switch over to it however is a near-insurmountable battle.

Many years ago I was playing on a friends Minecraft server, while in a then Skype call with some friends on the server

One user couldn't get Skype to work on their Arch Linux install, and proceeded to spend almost an hour badgering us and whining to switch to Mumble so they could "join the fun"

From our perspective, shifting our entire group conversation over to a brand new voice chat system just for one person seemed like an absolute joke. So they were left wanting

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Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by j1elo on Sunday June 27, 2021 @08:55AM (#27651200)

It also doesn't help that Mumble has a very bad UI for the average user.

I love it, because I'm an engineer and know what all those buttons and sliders do. My friends? they didn't like it at all. Thus making the switchover even harder.

This issue has been mentioned in the past already, and I think Mumble devs acknowledged this in the past... having a well polished UI is so important for user adoption! Just throwing all technical choices to the user's face is rarely the right solution.

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Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by andai on Sunday June 27, 2021 @02:05PM (#27653729)

Does it still badger you about certificate generation on first launch?

I used it with my friend in 2015 as a sort of galactic walkie-talkie on our phones -- he was in another country but we'd just walk around outside and talk to each other. It felt pretty futuristic at the time.

After a few minutes of continuous audio transmission though there would be a significant buildup of latency, so we developed the habit of saying "pineapple" to each other to measure the lag. Best record was 12 seconds.

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Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by j1elo on Sunday June 27, 2021 @06:26PM (#27656053)

Yes it does. Or it did circa 2019 when I last logged in for the first time.

Nice to see you had been having fun with it. Skype however had been there since a lot earlier, right? I guess that having to exolicitly "call" your friends removed a bit of that "walkie-talkie" feeling, but still...

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Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by slim on Sunday June 27, 2021 @07:59AM (#27650868)

What you did was not optimal. You had the opportunity to switch to a better platform and a strong incentive to do so (one member could not participate without it) you should have put the necessary effort to transition. It would have made your community stronger. Generally speaking, the policy of "none left behind" the most powerful bond-building tool available.

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Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by ferdowsi on Sunday June 27, 2021 @08:42AM (#27651120)

This is not the case if setting up and using Mumble would have caused net more friction for the rest of the community. See all the comments about needing to perform constant troubleshooting for mumble users.

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Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by supertrope on Sunday June 27, 2021 @03:36PM (#27654551)

You can't force peers to install software and take the time to train themselves on the new software like you can with an employee.

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Re:Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat by rowanG077 on Sunday June 27, 2021 @06:09PM (#27655948)

I have long left the online gaming community but this was no issue 10 years ago. We all switched between TeamSpeak 2, 3, ventrillo and mumble seemlessly.

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