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Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software
- ziddoap 8y agoMumble... What a blast from the past. Used to use this for gaming alongside Vent. If I'm not mistaken, the last update was in like 2017? Is it even in development any more?
- o10449366 8y agoYeah, back in the day it seemed like Mumble and TeamSpeak dominated the gaming market that's now been completely swallowed by Discord.
- privong 8y ago> If I'm not mistaken, the last update was in like 2017? Is it even in development any more? A 1.3.0-rc1 was tagged 9 days ago (17 March 2019): https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/releases/tag/1.3.0-rc1 https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/releases/tag/1.3.0-rc1 But it does look like the previous stable release was in January 2017.
- LinuxBender 8y agoThey update the the 1.3.x branch every couple months. It is quite stable. My semi-public server has been running on 1.3.x latest without issue.
- dharmab 8y agoDiscord has pretty much completely eaten Mumble's market. Free servers and a way better chat system ate Mumble's use case. TeamSpeak is still used by milsim/flightsim communities because it support plugins which integrate the in-sim radios with the VoIP system. EDIT: Got Vent and TS mixed up
- denimnerd42 8y agoIt's unfortunate because Mumble is great, secure free software with interesting features. I used to be a linux distro package manager for Mumble. Once my friends discovered discord no one wanted to join my mumble anymore. I think the biggest problem was setting the damn thing up on the client side. Murmur server is free though. It even runs great off of a home internet connection if you have the technical know-how to open the ports and set up a dynamic dns service.
- newaccoutnas 8y agoWe used it for talkback in a video capture project I was doing at a broadcaster (before they built that functionality in natively) worked a treat.
- eropple 8y agoSame here. I used to use Mumble as a way to get a bunch of remote voices into live video. Now I just use WebRTC via vMix Call, where I can mix it straight into my audio panel. Which is a better experience from a production side, but does have marginally more latency to deal with.
- bpye 8y agoYeah, I ran a Mumble server for my group of friends for years. Basically zero maintainance beyond ensuring the package was up to date. The client was fast but as you said, setting it up was less friendly than Discord. Same thing happened, everyone moved to Discord.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI really appreciate Mumble's dedication to lowering latency. Latency is a silent killer of conversation quality. When it's relatively small, you don't notice it's there, but it makes conversations more stilted because everyone's responses are just a bit less immediate. You chalk it up to the person or situation, rather than the software. I'm not seeing anyone make significant attempts to solve or reduce this problem. To my ears, 2010-era Skype had lower latency than any VOIP software in mainstream use today, including Skype. And of course, latency over POTS was fantastic, albeit with terrible audio quality.
- TomMarius 8y ago> To my ears, 2010-era Skype had lower latency than any of the modern VOIP systems in use today (including Skype). Yeah! What happened?
- mrguyorama 8y agoSkype went from point to point systems to routing through a server backend.
- solarkraft 8y agoAny idea why? Sounds stupid, considering latency losses and increased server costs.
- dymk 8y agoHole punching through routers. It's hard to generically connect two NAT'd devices directly. It's simpler to route through a central server.
- kitotik 8y agoHasn’t this been a solved problem for a while with STUN / TURN servers? The centralized server just handles the negotiation, so that the p2p clients can do their thing.
- Arie 8y agoFor over 10 years I've been running a semi-public Mumble server. It's pretty much zero effort, low CPU and low bandwidth usage. These days mainly just as a backup for when Discord lags, which over the past few weeks has been often. It's so nice to have a very good, open source, self-hosted, encrypted communications app as an alternative to yet another Electron app.
- LinuxBender 8y agoThat also makes the server requirements very simple. I have a tiny VM that can handle a lot of users. [edit] removed e2e, the clients are not using pfs yet.
- dcbadacd 8y agoIt's not end-to-end encrypted? It's only encrypted going to server, I'm quite certain of it.
- LinuxBender 8y agoI stand corrected. [1] I will see if I can find a way to replace a voice stream. Perhaps I am thinking of a forum thread about PFS. [1] - https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58568/is-mumble-encryption-end-to-end https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58568/is-mumble...
- dcbadacd 8y agoEven PFS doesn't really work well with Mumble due to the fact that most clients are using Qt4.
- snvzz 8y agoI'd add "difficult to use" to that list. Difficult even for an engineer to use. Terrible. It works great once you figure it out, but it could use a better user and admin experience.
- nightski 8y agoInteresting, 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?
- TheCapn 8y agoThe only issue I've ever had with it was that friends couldn't seem to connect to my self-hosted server when I shared the URL in Steam chat. Turns out that when you copy/paste from Steam's chat interface (on the old one at least) it automatically prepended "http://" http://" to the URL which Mumble was upset about. These were engineers too, and they didn't realize that pasting an http://URL http://URL to an IP/Port entry might not jive. So take anecdotes with the grain of salt they deserve because his "engineers", my "engineers" and your "engineers" are all vastly different people.
- rhn_mk1 8y agoSetting 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.
- LinuxBender 8y agoThe 1.3 snapshots have echo canceling and normalization.
- snvzz 8y agoThis was 2-3 years ago. I set up a server and a client. Install some packages, edit some config files. That was the easy part. Once connected to the server, with a friend (another engineer) also connected to the same server, neither of us could quickly figure out how it worked and how to talk to each other. We managed to after a few minutes, but it wasn't immediate, and I presume a normal person would have just given up. My guess is that it imitates some other programs which happen to be similar (I heard about teamspeak?) but that neither my friend nor I have used, and that unlike these programs (presumed) it doesn't have a tutorial or enough cues as to how it works.
- colkassad 8y agoWe live and die by Mumble in Eve Online. The hierarchical chat room setup is essential for large fleets.
- SendConsoleLogs 8y agoFunny story, as part of a mega alliance we have had issues with a couple hosting providers blackholing our mumble servers. We have so many new connections when big events happen that they auto-detect it as a DDOS.
- jqgatsby 8y agoThat sounds like a really interesting feature! Trying to find some documentation on this specific feature but it's hard to find exactly what you're talking about. 1) Can you elaborate how "hierarchical chat room" works and how fleets in Eve Online use this? 2) Do other game chat apps like Discord implement anything similar?
- dcbadacd 8y agoMumble'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.
- jqgatsby 8y agoI 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".
- balancemayvary 8y ago
- emersonrsantos 8y agoIs there a Mumble with video feed?
- Sebguer 8y agohttps://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Planned_Features#Video https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Planned_Features#Video Posted in 2011, lol. I wouldn't hold your breath.
- admax88q 8y agoI'm always amazed how many video games have shitty built in voice chat when they could have just embedded mumble.
- kkarakk 8y agono one uses in game voice chat, literally no one. even the friendliest most inclusive games with really amazing voice chat systems(all 3 needed to belong to this list) like overwatch had players use voice chat for maybe 3 weeks after launch and then go back to their private discords.
- admax88q 8y agoIn game voice chat is pretty common on CS:GO. Trying to get you group of 4 random teammates to hop on a specific discord is an annoying step.
- fisle 8y agoI play Overwatch and CS:GO and in competitive matches it is the norm to use in-game voice, if you don't - you'll get flamed about it. Casual game modes - that's different.
- geophertz 8y agoYeah but in fact almost no one solo Qs.
- Hikikomori 8y agoI remember our transition from ventrilo to mumble. Everyone kept talking over each other because of the low latency, we were used to start talking before others finished. Jumped the ship to discord on day 1 though, mostly for the chat features but also different communities you find there and easily can keep track of.
- keb_ 8y agoI still prefer to use Mumble over Discord for its low latency, low system requirements, simplicity, free software license, and voice activity options / wizard. I created a Discord server to fill the void of a Slack-like chat for our group, but even after we had created the Discord, we still preferred Mumble for VoIP. We ended up replacing the Discord chat with Riot.im eventually anyway.
- ethebubbeth 8y agoI still use mumble with friends for general voice chat. I really wish more games implemented its MumbleLink API for positional audio between clients. https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Link https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Link For example, GW2 implements so people sound relative to where your characters are if they are on the same map. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:MumbleLink https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:MumbleLink The API has also allowed for other tools such at GW2 Tactical Overlay (http://www.gw2taco.com/ http://www.gw2taco.com/) to present additional positional information.
- cliff 8y agoHappy to see people using that! :) I implemented that Mumble integration while I was at ArenaNet.
- ReidZB 8y agoAwesome, thanks for that! By the way: that integration has been co-opted for use by a bunch of overlay software, like gw2taco [1]. So, even if not used for Mumble, it's now a pretty big feature for other 3rd party software. I use it regularly myself. (For the unfamiliar: gw2taco et al use position/viewport data, I guess, from the GW2 Mumble API to draw an overlay on top of the game with navigational markers/aids.) [1]: http://www.gw2taco.com/ http://www.gw2taco.com/
- cliff 8y agoCool, that was actually what I had hoped would happen! It was fun creating public APIs; the ArenaNet leadership was extremely supportive.
- johntash 8y agoI don't use Mumble for voice chat, but I do really appreciate mumblelink api being implemented in GW2 for things like gw2taco, so thanks!
- Frost1x 8y ago
- Notorious_BLT 8y agoI've managed to keep a group of friends using Mumble instead of Discord, and I think we've all benefited from it. My privacy-focused friend appreciates the encryption and everyone else appreciates the ability to locally mute people if they walk away with their headset hot-mic'ed. We use discord for text communication, but when people are online for games or just to chat, we use Mumble.
- ziddoap 8y agoI mean, you can locally mute people in Discord too so I'm not quite sure why that is in the "pro" side for Mumble. However, I'll agree that Mumble is great if all your looking for is somewhat privacy-forward low-latency voice chat with minimal bloat.
- Notorious_BLT 8y agoOh, fair enough, I didn't know people could local-mute in discord, when I used it I didn't notice the feature. The low-latency and lack of bloat is still a major plus though.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI 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 dirt cheap, I mostly forgot how few dollars I spent on a multi-year subscription for a server. It might cost me a month of Netflix for a year of Mumble.
- majewsky 8y ago> I do take mumble.com up on server hosting, because it's so dirt cheap https://www.mumble.com/mumble-server-pricing.php 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.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoAh, that is what I paid. I recall it being less but I checked. The difference, of course, is that I don't manage any virtual servers, and don't even really think about my Mumble server, it's just there. And $3.75 per month is not a significant cost for running a podcast, even if you make no revenue on it.
- raihansaputra 8y agoDo you have guests on your podcast? Does Mumble have a one-click web client for the session? Interested in this as I had an idea about remote-recording interview app, but I don't really know the space as of now.
- Svoka 8y agoNo, it doesn't. We have self-hosted mumble server, and guest set-up is quite easy. Enter couple parameters and you're good. But again, it's a techie podcast, so may be it is harder than click here and start talking Discord's approach.
- dcbadacd 8y agoThe only thing that's annoying about mumble is the `mumble.com` namesquatting, distributing outdated clients to people I've tried to get to use Mumble.
- alfg 8y agoI use Discord now since most of my friends are on it, but I've always been a fan of Mumble (and murmur server) since it's high quality software and open source. I also made https://guildbit.com https://guildbit.com years ago for gamers that want to just quickly spin up a temporary server with their friends. I still operate it today since there's still a few users out there. I think it would be cool if someone were to create an open source Discord clone using Mumble/murmur.
- lwhsiao 8y agoI'm a huge fan of guildbit, it makes it really easy to get a quick temporary server. We use it all the time.
- alfg 8y agoThank you! I'm glad you like it! :)
- radus 8y agoHere's a mumble web client: https://github.com/Johni0702/mumble-web https://github.com/Johni0702/mumble-web
- MayeulC 8y agoIndeed, I've just found it myself! That's something I've wanted for literally years. Wit a bit of polish, this could be a credible one-click alternative to most proprietary solutions. It just needs to see some murmur integration. Being able to embed this inside a Riot chat room is a nice touch as well, but that kind of integration is always a double-edged sword with Matrix clients, as it will only work on electron apps. There is also a WebRTC bridge, it seems: https://github.com/Rantanen/mumble-web https://github.com/Rantanen/mumble-web This submission reminded me of Mumble, which I'm definitely going to use instead of trying to come up with a common WebRTC platform, that works for every one of us.
- sadris 8y agoI think mattermost is working on a couple plugin.
- holtalanm 8y agoi prefer discord, imo. Ive tried most of the popular voice chat clients out there, including Mumble, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, RaidCall, Google Hangouts, and Skype. Discord is (so far) the best out of all of them in my opinion.
- m_b 8y agoLooks so 2000s to visit this website.
- Animats 8y agoAnyone tried this? How is it on echo cancellation, VOX, and conference noise rejection?
- c0l0 8y agoAh, mumble! In a former online life of mine, this was one of the key components for my clan to advance into the Eurocup finals of 2006 (or maybe it was 2005?) in Rocket Arena for Q3A =) All the other teams were on (I guess) teamspeak2, and latency was noticably higher for them due to the inferor audio/voice codec employed. I originally considered mumble and murmur attractive due to the fact that the client and server were both proper FOSS, but it proved a secret ingredient to our success back then. I still use it to this day, but since most games include a voice chat thingie of their own these days, I can understand it isn't more popular. Awesome piece of software, and very polished for a FOSS desktop project!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Kenji 8y agoMumble is fantastic. I set up a server for family & friends. The clarity is unmatched and the server is authenticated and encrypted so nobody can listen in, unless they break one of the clients or your server.
- monkeydust 8y agoLow Latency makes it ideal for voice trading.
- jboogie77 8y agoHuge fan of mumble. Me and my friends still use it over discord. It barely beats discord for us but that small improvement over quality and latency is enough to keep using it
- openloop 8y agoThe naming of this otherwise wonderful software package is unfortunate.
- ThatPlayer 8y agoOne of my favorite features that Mumble has that Discord doesn't is the ability to suppress a keypress you're using for push-to-talk. For example, I use Caps Lock for my PTT, as it is right there and not used in most games anyways. With Mumble Caps Lock will not toggle at all with that option, allowing me to type or do other things fine.
- checkyoursudo 8y agoI used mumble with friends years ago. Mumble was a pretty nice experience for gaming with friends back when I could do that kind of thing more often. I see that there is a mumble client for iOS. Has anyone here used it? If so, is it any good?
- lvh 8y agoIt looks like voice packets are intended to be OCB2 (CryptState.cpp, cryptstate go package in Grumble). I haven't read the code through to figure out how to mount it (and it looks slightly funky), but if it does what it says on the tin there's a trivial, one-encryption-oracle-message forgery attack for that. Also: I don't think that means you shouldn't use Mumble. I just think someone should see if they can exploit that bug and then get someone to fix it :-) I went on their IRC and someone talked to me within 5 minutes, which is a Good Sign(TM). (I wish I had more time to just do random audits of open source projects, but the incentives aren't really lined up for that to happen, and I do more than a bit of open source work already.) [cryptstate]: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/blob/4976c1ad2e0802755c15d051783403afc440b173/src/CryptState.cpp https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/blob/4976c1ad2e0802755... [ocb2-go]: https://github.com/mumble-voip/grumble/blob/master/pkg/cryptstate/ocb2/ocb2.go https://github.com/mumble-voip/grumble/blob/master/pkg/crypt... [ocb-forgery]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1040.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1040.pdf
- zaroth 8y agoIs it the last step of the encrypt function which would need an additional XOR operation added (XEX va XE for the encryption of the tag) to mitigate this attack? [1] S3(delta); XOR(tmp, delta, checksum); AESencrypt(tmp, tag, &encrypt_key); [1] - https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/63642 https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/63642
- lvh 8y agoThe cryptographic answer is: yep, that sounds about right (with low confidence because the model violation is subtle). The cryptographic engineering answer is: use OCB3 instead which doesn't have this problem :)
- bjoli 8y agoWow. When was it written? OCB3 is almost 8 years old. Wonder why it wasn't used.
- NikkiA 8y ago
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoMumble definitely works, and the voice quality is very good, exceptional maybe, but the user interface is atrocious. Don’t expect non-technical users to be able to figure this client out. I know Discord isn’t open, but it’s a lot easier to figure out by most people.
- mushufasa 8y agofunny that they rolled their own license, where the terms seem compatible more well-known licenses. Maybe the project started before convergence to standard permissive licenses? Would it even be possible for them to change it at this point? I'm guessing it would be difficult at the least.
- zZorgz 8y agoAh, good old mumble. I had contributed a patch to it a few years ago, made it sometime in 1.2.9 The community I was in all moved to discord though. Explaining new users how to use mumble was also too hard as I recall. And it didn’t have such a great user interface but I don’t remember vent/TS being super great too.
- tjpnz 8y ago/
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- lamby 8y agoPurism (https://puri.sm/ https://puri.sm/) uses Mumble for all-hands staff meetings. Works pretty well and, of course, is free software. :)
- Causality1 8y agoMumble has been the highest-quality group voice chat system for many years now. It's unfortunate server is such a pain in the ass to get running properly. I'd rather pay for a commercial Mumble server than go through that troubleshooting nightmare again.
- BuckRogers 8y agoI went from Teamspeak->Ventrilo->Mumble. Never got onboard with Discord just due to life timing when that was on the rise. I would probably just use Steam voice chat for 1:1 gaming sessions or in-game today. I know League of Legends has voice chat for parties now, which is the only use case that I could have.
- hadlock 8y agoI used to run a gaming server(s) for about four years, we peaked at about 3500 registered users, with 200 concurrent users.... We used Mumble in the community before I came along, we ran Mumble, after I came along, I took over the server and hosted it on a 1 core, 512mb memory linux server.... never went above 2% cpu and... I forget, probably 150MB memory usage with no restriction on quality (users can transmit CD quality audio)... this worked great, I set it up in about 10 minutes with little experience at the time, and the mumble server ran for years without issue until someone dictionary attacked the password. Big advantages: 1. Free 2. Very low resource requrements, even for hundreds of users. Probably runs great on a google micro-f1 (Free forever) instance 3. Crystal clear audio 4. Lots of in-game plugins, such as positional audio in game (Battlefield: Bad Company 2, you could hear your teammates talking as they came up the stairs behind you, etc) 5. Cert based identity management. Used private key auth to verify you were you; no other user could sign in and impersonate you. Certified users had a big yellow C next to their name. Probably the biggest thing for me, is that there was never, ever an audio glitch where the computer was not able to send/receive audio. We regularly run in to audio problems in Meet/Hangouts where audio does not work properly. When I looked in to online gaming a couple of years ago I was stunned to see that everyone had moved to Discord, I didn't see the advantage of "upgrading" to something with a web client, but I suppose there's less friction to using a web client, even if mumble is a very easy install on Windows.