Mumble is a very stable VoIP solution for gamers that has a purpose to give the impression of being in the same room to those who use it. This means a very high quality sound compression, background noise filtering, echo cancellations, and last but not least, not delayed communication. Reproducing the voice without using any filters attached to the recording and/or playback equipment is quite difficult, and reproduction without delays is even more difficult. But it seems that Mumble has managed to impose its quality in the market.
Mumble is basically an application for group voice conversation. Although it is an application developed mainly for those who play a lot, it can practically be used in any other activity. We can compare Mumble with applications like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak.
For simplifying the name, it is generally called “Mumble” (which is actually the client application), but actually the complete solution for conversation is called Mumble & Murmur.
Mumble covers the needs of the gamers through its functionality in the background of full-screen gaming, but also offers a module that basically allows Mumble to be used in games, with the ability to control Mumble’s functions over the game screen. This module also provides a graphical representation of those who participate in the discussion. Also when used in games that supports it, Mumble offers audio positioning, playing back the voice of the game colleagues in the direction they are distributed in the game.
The application’s server component is called Murmur. The server can be run on any computer capable of compiling Qt4. For the client, there are variants that can be used on both Linux and Mac OSx or Windows. Mumble is known as a low-latency application with good sound quality. Speex is a similar application which also uses special technologies to compress the voices. Also with these two technologies is made the preprocessing of the sound, in order to remove the noise and improve the sound quality during playback.
Benefits:
1. The software is an open source therefore free of charge;
2. The latency is low, it has high-quality voice and echo cancellation;
3. It can be run on Windows, Mac OS and most Linux distributions;
4. Free server software;
5. A good security practice in regards with passwords.
6. Encryption is applied to all voice data;
7. The bandwidth required is 20 kbps, which is relatively small;
8. It is also an application that does not consume much of the computer resources.
Disadvantages:
1. It requires certain technical skills, especially to configure the installation in the server;
2. The interface that is not impressive;
The binary installation package containing the client and server software is no larger than 18 MB.
You and all other members of your group must have a client application on your computers, the Mumble application, and the computers have to be connected to a server running Murmur, the server application.
Installing Mumble:
In the “Debian unstable” warehouse you can find the latest version of Mumble, as soon as a new version passes the test side it will be ported to “stable”. In order to configure the server is enough for you to run the command:
dpkg -reconfigure mumble-server
Ubuntu includes the current version in the “universe” repository.