8 ms·

Being open source, low latency, and having high quality audio doesn't do much when the clients are absolutely horrible, everything has horrible UX, and absolute

Being open source, low latency, and having high quality audio doesn't do much when the clients are absolutely horrible, everything has horrible UX, and absolutely zero echo cancelation.

ekianjo 5y ago
Maybe there is potential for Mumble to improve going forward ?
- foxpurple 5y ago
  It’s almost impossible for them to compete with discord at this point. Discord is so good it has raised the bar far beyond what foss developers can make in their free time.
  - calpaterson 5y ago
    As an occasional user of discord I cannot understand that at all. It is one of the most confusing UIs I have ever used, everything from finding the settings to joining or telling what channel you are connected to is done in a "unique UI paradigm". Quality of calls is good but the app is mental
    - trampypizza 5y ago
      In my experience, discord was better than the previous options for a few reasons. A) it's free, as opposed to a vent or TS server, which while they are not expensive, it's still a barrier to setting one up. B) the free tier has quite a lot of functionality without paying for servers, even for a lot of players (like a World of Warcraft guild). C) it merged voice Comms with a community hub where people could communicate and share things relevant to their game (to use the WoW scenario again, raid organising, upcoming patch discussion, guides and other helpful information) in an organised and central location. I recognise there is a bunch of issues with discord, I've had it have complete melt downs when the voice systems have broken, it can be a real resource hog, and don't get me started on the security and privacy (it's not great), however because of the additional functionality I still think it's a great bit of software. I'm so glad I don't have to be in Warcraft guild Facebook groups anymore!
      - calpaterson 5y ago
        These three points are all well and good but they don't contradict my original points: Discord's UI is exceptionally confusing and requires specific knowledge to operate it. This isn't a field with brilliant UI either: eg it's often confusing whether you're muted or unmuted on most videoconferencing programs. Even so, Discord is definitely the most confusing videoconferencing UI I can remember using. I'm sure that harms adoption greatly, even if it is still very popular.
        trampypizza 5y ago
        Oh I don't disagree with you! My purpose was not to suggest you were wrong, just present my experience and thoughts about why it's become so widely used _despite_ the issues you've raised. I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives. That has certainly been my experience, which I appreciate is a single data point.
        calpaterson 5y ago
        > I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives. I'm sure you're right! The robustness of Discord's call quality definitely seems to be much better than average (though a lot of this comes down to people's local networking hardware).
    - fishmaster 5y ago
      Discord is quite easy to use for dozens of people I know, most of whom aren't programmers or heavy PC users. It just works and it's great, especially the noise cancelling.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - foxpurple 5y ago
      Discord is in between casual and power user. Once you are on 5 groups and using many of the features you wouldn’t want it any other way.
    - apetrovic 5y ago
      And yet my 12 years old daughter use Discord with her friends without asking me a thing.
    - knownjorbist 5y ago
      You are probably in a very, very small minority there. The only confusion I've had with the interface is in the minutiae of some niche settings.
    - xibo9 5y ago
      You are quite literally the first person I've seen say the UI in Discord is confusing. For everything Discord gets wrong, I would never put the UI on that list.
  - BelenusMordred 5y ago
    Discord audio is terrible and unreliable, I don't know how people use it for anything other than casual chatting. Maybe people are just impressed solely by UI but they are apples and oranges wrt quality.
    - fishmaster 5y ago
      People use it precisely because the audio is great and just works.
    - truth_ 5y ago
      I regularly take part in programming groups, paper reading groups, and book reading groups with Discord. It works flawlessly without any problem. Screen-sharing, video chat, voice all work properly as expected. I also admin several servers, some of which are completely unrelated to tech and non-tech people find it seamless to use. And their noise suppression just works. I have only seen better video quality in Google Duo, and better voice quality in 4G VoLTE calls. Only three issues I have with Discord- 1. It requires high speed internet connection. How high? People with 3 MBPS reported seamless use. 2. The clients are resource hogs. The mobile clients drop the battery too quick, and takes too much RAM in PCs. Although the latter has improved with updates. 3. I am concerned about privacy. Discord is as close-sourced as it gets.
    - Already__Taken 5y ago
      We all take turns streaming the driver POV in sim racing for multiple hours in driver swapped endurance. I think there's a whole category of esports coming only made possible by discord. Works flawlessly.
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      I use Discord to stay in touch with a group of friends who use potatoes as PCs and the worst version of cable internet (cox). The voice quality is always flawless, even though in games we often run into game connectivity issues, the voice comes through loud and clear.
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago
    Certainly possible to be better than Discord. I tried Discord once for a friend’s virtual party. Horrible sound quality, horrible connection issues both on Windows client and iOS app - not to speak of fully pegging the CPUs for a video chat app. The experience was far worse than a Zoom or Teams call. Maybe for 24/7 gamers who have tweaked it until they found the right setup, Discord “just works”, but for me it seemed unfit for purpose.
    - undfg 5y ago
      If you had horrible sound quality and horrible connection issues with discord you are in the absolute minority.
      - lapnitnelav 5y ago
        No, I have been hanging around in Discord for a while now and I've run quite often into issues with connection issues for specific servers (I guess some clusters going down) and them being OOO for a while. Mumble on the other hand tends to be pretty reliable and comes back up in a few seconds anyway whenever it fails.
      - Duralias 5y ago
        A friend and I both got really nice microphones but when in a discord call you can not tell the difference between them and an above average wireless headset microphone (these are usually much worse than their wired equivalent). Recording the audio in windows you can easily tell the difference between them, but not over discord. Even tried upping the bitrate but it made no noticeable difference.
    - knownjorbist 5y ago
      I've had the exact opposite experience with Discord, personally. Flawless streaming of 1080p60 games, screens, voice & video chat. Text chat/channels are intuitive. Embeds just work. Teams on the other hand has a terrible UI for text chat, but the voice/video meetings are fine.
  - rijoja 5y ago
    I do not find Discord that impressive. It is very slow on less powerful hardware, which really shouldn't happen for software of this type.
  - whateveracct 5y ago
    Discord isn't good though. It's just There.
    - knownjorbist 5y ago
      What makes it not good?
      - unpopularopp 5y ago
        HN: not open source = bad. See all the topics about Excel. Some people just can't accept that proprietary software can be and actually is good.
        whateveracct 5y ago
        Nah it just isn't good. Or especially bad. Like I said, Discord is just There. The only reason to use it is because others are already using it. But nothing about the product design jumps out as "good."
        DynamicStatic 5y ago
        As someone who runs a discord community closing in on 7k I can tell you that discord is far easier to manage. More features, built in statistics, good role setups, plenty of bots and a easy API. The open source alternatives are light-years behind unfortunately.
        knownjorbist 5y ago
        Can you give an example of something especially good in comparison? Examples of things especially bad in comparison include essentially everything I can think of that attempts to address the same niche.
  - daptaq 5y ago
    Somewhat unrelated, but can you explain to me why every small youtuber or github project seems to have a discord server nowadays? Do people really need to talk all the time, with every group of people they interact with?
    - hrydgard 5y ago
      Many projects, including mine, just use it without the voice features, as a modern replacement for IRC. It does work great for that.
      - pmoriarty 5y ago
        "It does work great for that." My main problem with Discord is that I can't get logs out of it. I want to archive all the channels I'm in, so I can search the archives offline using regular text search tools. But as far as I know there's no way to do that. (The closest I've come is copying and pasting text out of it, screen by screen, which is a very long and tedious process.) The Discord client has rudimentary search capability but you have to be online and connected to the Discord server you want to search to use it, and there's no guarantee it'll continue to work indefinitely, and if you ever leave that server your ability to search it is gone. Scrolling through chat history is also incredibly slow (especially if you have to scroll more than a little, as it slows down significantly when you scroll back a certain amount and it has to load the chat history from the server). The Discord client is a resource hog too, and on my old slow laptop I dread playing a game and having Discord open at the same time as this combination will often slow down the game to the point that it's unplayable. None of these problems exist with IRC. With IRC you own your own data, and if you want to log and search offline it's super easy to do. IRC clients like weechat are super lightweight so don't cause any problems when running along with other apps, and scrolling back through chat history is lightning fast. The main thing that Discord has going for it as an IRC replacement is that it can show images and videos inline in the chat, and it has a nice looking client. But having your data locked away and at the whims of a corporation and having to suffer through all the other annoyances and inconveniences of the Discord client makes it a poor replacement for IRC for me.
    - Duralias 5y ago
  - boudin 5y ago
    It's a matter of taste I guess, but I find Discord UI horrible. It's also eating way too much resources for what it does.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    I don't know how the commenters below you miss your point consistently. Discord is featureful and each feature is only a couple of clicks away, and every nitty-gritty is nicely abstracted away under the UI. Surely it was a bit of time to get the hang of their UX, but I can't seriously see _any_ FOSS software to do audio, video, screen sharing, IM with groups and users, all packed into a nice consistent package. For one, Discord must have a serious backend and constant support to back this all up. The other thing is that joining is like zero effort. You click on an invite link, it only asks you a handle, and bam, you land on the server, ready to go. And you have several ways to "upgrade", you can register your handle, download and use the desktop app. With a buttery smooth transition to both. I can see FOSS software outperform Discord, if you pick an aspect, like "low latency audio". But if someone wants to make FOSS successful, they better focus on the user experience. People sacrifice a good bit of everything else, just to get a better UX, and the more developers realize this, the more potential their projects have to succeed.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      What about Jitsi or BigBlueButton? They're as easy to use a Discord if not easier and are entirely free-software you can selfhost. Plus if you don't want to selfhost it's super easy to find a host for those solutions.
      - npteljes 5y ago
        I have yet to try them. I'd love to unseat proprietary IM services in my circle.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        Please do! Only problem is you can't use them through the Tor network, but if that's not a requirement for you (and it's anyway not possible with discord either to my knowledge) then these solutions will probably make you very happy. The last version of BBB released a few weeks ago apparently reduced resource-usage by up to two thirds server-side and brought in long-awaited features. Or so i heard from friendly hosting collectives, who definitely recommend to give it a go.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    i dont understand the point where it competes in the same space ? mumble does not have ads, does not sell your data, and certainly does not need to run ontop of Electron.
    - anticensor 5y ago
      > mumble does not have ads Discord does not have ads either.
  - sundvor 5y ago
    Discord is good but has some infuriating issues such as not recording device IDs when mapping buttons - eg for muting or swapping PTT/voice activated. Eg. press `\\usb2\button1` - and it will be triggered by ANY USB device with a `button1`. It's a recorded (sorry) issue, they don't seem to care. My use case is simracing with a couple of button boxes in addition to those on the wheel; the outcomes of this issue can be incredibly random (and frustrating) mid race. Also (especially applicable if you host a small community) to get high quality streams you must put a staggering amount of nitro dollars in on a monthly basis.
- AntwaneB 5y ago
  Mumble has been around for more than 15 years, if they were going to improve on those it would have already been done.
  - daptaq 5y ago
    I'd say a certain, little pandemic situation might spur interest in improving the FOSS situation when it comes to VOIP.
    - throaway46546 5y ago
      The pandemic has been ongoing for quite some time.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - daptaq 5y ago
        And Mumble has published a release, and is preparing a new one.
  - gsich 5y ago
    They don't get payed, so this is not an assumption I would make.
  - rareform 5y ago
    They did a full UI overhaul a year or two ago.
pabs3 5y ago
Not sure if it is on by default, but the Audio Input prefs mention two different types of echo cancelation.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  If it's on by default then it doesn't work. I can confirm that the audio quality is only theoretically better than Discord. In practice it is much worse due to echoes, poorly adjusted volumes, etc.
  - zackmorris 5y ago
    I checked and they do have 2 types of echo cancellation (mixed/mono and multichannel): https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Audio#Echo_Cancellation https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Audio#Echo_Cancellation But looks like they maybe still have blockers that prevent them from enabling it by default: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/4178 https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/4178 Normally I would attribute this to these types of libraries evolving from the UNIX mindset, which almost always lacks sane defaults. But in this case, it looks like it has more to do with difficulties around maybe Apple's secrecy and patents around their own echo cancellation implementation. Hopefully I'm wrong about that. When I was working on a networked game around 2005, I dabbled with Speex and Vorbis. I found the Ogg maintainers to be rather hostile to my suggestions around echo cancellation. I suggested some stuff with autocorrolations to find the echo delay offset, since I had used them quite a bit as a contractor at hp. I was thinking that maybe they would let it dynamically adjust with little overhead, rather than needing a fixed delay between the microphone and speakers. I wanted this for the Mac, where there was no low-level way to access the mic and speaker hardware like on the PC, so I was concerned that there wouldn't be a fixed time offset available with Apple APIs. At the time, I thought they were just dismissing me as a n00b, but now I understand that they were just terribly overextended. These libraries are difficult to maintain, not because of any technological reason (this stuff was well-understood by the mid 1990s), but because of hardware/driver errata, constant undermining by big established OS players caving to entertainment lobbyists like the RIAA, and the constant threat of lawsuits by patent trolls. I would say the same thing about mesh networks or BitTorrent or Skype before Microsoft bought it or TikTok any of the other faces of the "real" internet that routes around censorship and inconveniences those who profit from the status quo.
blensor 5y ago
I am using a self hosted Jitsi-Meet server as the audio backend in VRWorkout. Their client runs in the browser and works pretty well. You don't get positional audio tho.
keb_ 5y ago
I honestly find the UX, clients, and echo cancelation to be great with Mumble and Mumla on mobile. I guess YMMV.

Being open source, low latency, and having high quality audio doesn't do much when the clients are absolutely horrible, everything has horrible UX, and absolutely zero echo cancelation.

ekianjo 5y ago

Maybe there is potential for Mumble to improve going forward ?

foxpurple 5y ago
It’s almost impossible for them to compete with discord at this point. Discord is so good it has raised the bar far beyond what foss developers can make in their free time.
- calpaterson 5y ago
  As an occasional user of discord I cannot understand that at all. It is one of the most confusing UIs I have ever used, everything from finding the settings to joining or telling what channel you are connected to is done in a "unique UI paradigm". Quality of calls is good but the app is mental
  - trampypizza 5y ago
    In my experience, discord was better than the previous options for a few reasons. A) it's free, as opposed to a vent or TS server, which while they are not expensive, it's still a barrier to setting one up. B) the free tier has quite a lot of functionality without paying for servers, even for a lot of players (like a World of Warcraft guild). C) it merged voice Comms with a community hub where people could communicate and share things relevant to their game (to use the WoW scenario again, raid organising, upcoming patch discussion, guides and other helpful information) in an organised and central location. I recognise there is a bunch of issues with discord, I've had it have complete melt downs when the voice systems have broken, it can be a real resource hog, and don't get me started on the security and privacy (it's not great), however because of the additional functionality I still think it's a great bit of software. I'm so glad I don't have to be in Warcraft guild Facebook groups anymore!
    - calpaterson 5y ago
      These three points are all well and good but they don't contradict my original points: Discord's UI is exceptionally confusing and requires specific knowledge to operate it. This isn't a field with brilliant UI either: eg it's often confusing whether you're muted or unmuted on most videoconferencing programs. Even so, Discord is definitely the most confusing videoconferencing UI I can remember using. I'm sure that harms adoption greatly, even if it is still very popular.
      - trampypizza 5y ago
        Oh I don't disagree with you! My purpose was not to suggest you were wrong, just present my experience and thoughts about why it's become so widely used _despite_ the issues you've raised. I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives. That has certainly been my experience, which I appreciate is a single data point.
        calpaterson 5y ago
        > I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives. I'm sure you're right! The robustness of Discord's call quality definitely seems to be much better than average (though a lot of this comes down to people's local networking hardware).
  - fishmaster 5y ago
    Discord is quite easy to use for dozens of people I know, most of whom aren't programmers or heavy PC users. It just works and it's great, especially the noise cancelling.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    Discord is in between casual and power user. Once you are on 5 groups and using many of the features you wouldn’t want it any other way.
  - apetrovic 5y ago
    And yet my 12 years old daughter use Discord with her friends without asking me a thing.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    You are probably in a very, very small minority there. The only confusion I've had with the interface is in the minutiae of some niche settings.
  - xibo9 5y ago
    You are quite literally the first person I've seen say the UI in Discord is confusing. For everything Discord gets wrong, I would never put the UI on that list.
- BelenusMordred 5y ago
  Discord audio is terrible and unreliable, I don't know how people use it for anything other than casual chatting. Maybe people are just impressed solely by UI but they are apples and oranges wrt quality.
  - fishmaster 5y ago
    People use it precisely because the audio is great and just works.
  - truth_ 5y ago
    I regularly take part in programming groups, paper reading groups, and book reading groups with Discord. It works flawlessly without any problem. Screen-sharing, video chat, voice all work properly as expected. I also admin several servers, some of which are completely unrelated to tech and non-tech people find it seamless to use. And their noise suppression just works. I have only seen better video quality in Google Duo, and better voice quality in 4G VoLTE calls. Only three issues I have with Discord- 1. It requires high speed internet connection. How high? People with 3 MBPS reported seamless use. 2. The clients are resource hogs. The mobile clients drop the battery too quick, and takes too much RAM in PCs. Although the latter has improved with updates. 3. I am concerned about privacy. Discord is as close-sourced as it gets.
  - Already__Taken 5y ago
    We all take turns streaming the driver POV in sim racing for multiple hours in driver swapped endurance. I think there's a whole category of esports coming only made possible by discord. Works flawlessly.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    I use Discord to stay in touch with a group of friends who use potatoes as PCs and the worst version of cable internet (cox). The voice quality is always flawless, even though in games we often run into game connectivity issues, the voice comes through loud and clear.
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  Certainly possible to be better than Discord. I tried Discord once for a friend’s virtual party. Horrible sound quality, horrible connection issues both on Windows client and iOS app - not to speak of fully pegging the CPUs for a video chat app. The experience was far worse than a Zoom or Teams call. Maybe for 24/7 gamers who have tweaked it until they found the right setup, Discord “just works”, but for me it seemed unfit for purpose.
  - undfg 5y ago
    If you had horrible sound quality and horrible connection issues with discord you are in the absolute minority.
    - lapnitnelav 5y ago
      No, I have been hanging around in Discord for a while now and I've run quite often into issues with connection issues for specific servers (I guess some clusters going down) and them being OOO for a while. Mumble on the other hand tends to be pretty reliable and comes back up in a few seconds anyway whenever it fails.
    - Duralias 5y ago
      A friend and I both got really nice microphones but when in a discord call you can not tell the difference between them and an above average wireless headset microphone (these are usually much worse than their wired equivalent). Recording the audio in windows you can easily tell the difference between them, but not over discord. Even tried upping the bitrate but it made no noticeable difference.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    I've had the exact opposite experience with Discord, personally. Flawless streaming of 1080p60 games, screens, voice & video chat. Text chat/channels are intuitive. Embeds just work. Teams on the other hand has a terrible UI for text chat, but the voice/video meetings are fine.
- rijoja 5y ago
  I do not find Discord that impressive. It is very slow on less powerful hardware, which really shouldn't happen for software of this type.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  Discord isn't good though. It's just There.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    What makes it not good?
    - unpopularopp 5y ago
      HN: not open source = bad. See all the topics about Excel. Some people just can't accept that proprietary software can be and actually is good.
      - whateveracct 5y ago
        Nah it just isn't good. Or especially bad. Like I said, Discord is just There. The only reason to use it is because others are already using it. But nothing about the product design jumps out as "good."
        DynamicStatic 5y ago
        As someone who runs a discord community closing in on 7k I can tell you that discord is far easier to manage. More features, built in statistics, good role setups, plenty of bots and a easy API. The open source alternatives are light-years behind unfortunately.
        knownjorbist 5y ago
        Can you give an example of something especially good in comparison? Examples of things especially bad in comparison include essentially everything I can think of that attempts to address the same niche.
- daptaq 5y ago
  Somewhat unrelated, but can you explain to me why every small youtuber or github project seems to have a discord server nowadays? Do people really need to talk all the time, with every group of people they interact with?
  - hrydgard 5y ago
    Many projects, including mine, just use it without the voice features, as a modern replacement for IRC. It does work great for that.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      "It does work great for that." My main problem with Discord is that I can't get logs out of it. I want to archive all the channels I'm in, so I can search the archives offline using regular text search tools. But as far as I know there's no way to do that. (The closest I've come is copying and pasting text out of it, screen by screen, which is a very long and tedious process.) The Discord client has rudimentary search capability but you have to be online and connected to the Discord server you want to search to use it, and there's no guarantee it'll continue to work indefinitely, and if you ever leave that server your ability to search it is gone. Scrolling through chat history is also incredibly slow (especially if you have to scroll more than a little, as it slows down significantly when you scroll back a certain amount and it has to load the chat history from the server). The Discord client is a resource hog too, and on my old slow laptop I dread playing a game and having Discord open at the same time as this combination will often slow down the game to the point that it's unplayable. None of these problems exist with IRC. With IRC you own your own data, and if you want to log and search offline it's super easy to do. IRC clients like weechat are super lightweight so don't cause any problems when running along with other apps, and scrolling back through chat history is lightning fast. The main thing that Discord has going for it as an IRC replacement is that it can show images and videos inline in the chat, and it has a nice looking client. But having your data locked away and at the whims of a corporation and having to suffer through all the other annoyances and inconveniences of the Discord client makes it a poor replacement for IRC for me.
  - Duralias 5y ago
- boudin 5y ago
  It's a matter of taste I guess, but I find Discord UI horrible. It's also eating way too much resources for what it does.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I don't know how the commenters below you miss your point consistently. Discord is featureful and each feature is only a couple of clicks away, and every nitty-gritty is nicely abstracted away under the UI. Surely it was a bit of time to get the hang of their UX, but I can't seriously see _any_ FOSS software to do audio, video, screen sharing, IM with groups and users, all packed into a nice consistent package. For one, Discord must have a serious backend and constant support to back this all up. The other thing is that joining is like zero effort. You click on an invite link, it only asks you a handle, and bam, you land on the server, ready to go. And you have several ways to "upgrade", you can register your handle, download and use the desktop app. With a buttery smooth transition to both. I can see FOSS software outperform Discord, if you pick an aspect, like "low latency audio". But if someone wants to make FOSS successful, they better focus on the user experience. People sacrifice a good bit of everything else, just to get a better UX, and the more developers realize this, the more potential their projects have to succeed.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    What about Jitsi or BigBlueButton? They're as easy to use a Discord if not easier and are entirely free-software you can selfhost. Plus if you don't want to selfhost it's super easy to find a host for those solutions.
    - npteljes 5y ago
      I have yet to try them. I'd love to unseat proprietary IM services in my circle.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        Please do! Only problem is you can't use them through the Tor network, but if that's not a requirement for you (and it's anyway not possible with discord either to my knowledge) then these solutions will probably make you very happy. The last version of BBB released a few weeks ago apparently reduced resource-usage by up to two thirds server-side and brought in long-awaited features. Or so i heard from friendly hosting collectives, who definitely recommend to give it a go.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  i dont understand the point where it competes in the same space ? mumble does not have ads, does not sell your data, and certainly does not need to run ontop of Electron.
  - anticensor 5y ago
    > mumble does not have ads Discord does not have ads either.
- sundvor 5y ago
  Discord is good but has some infuriating issues such as not recording device IDs when mapping buttons - eg for muting or swapping PTT/voice activated. Eg. press `\\usb2\button1` - and it will be triggered by ANY USB device with a `button1`. It's a recorded (sorry) issue, they don't seem to care. My use case is simracing with a couple of button boxes in addition to those on the wheel; the outcomes of this issue can be incredibly random (and frustrating) mid race. Also (especially applicable if you host a small community) to get high quality streams you must put a staggering amount of nitro dollars in on a monthly basis.
AntwaneB 5y ago
Mumble has been around for more than 15 years, if they were going to improve on those it would have already been done.
- daptaq 5y ago
  I'd say a certain, little pandemic situation might spur interest in improving the FOSS situation when it comes to VOIP.
  - throaway46546 5y ago
    The pandemic has been ongoing for quite some time.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - daptaq 5y ago
      And Mumble has published a release, and is preparing a new one.
- gsich 5y ago
  They don't get payed, so this is not an assumption I would make.
- rareform 5y ago
  They did a full UI overhaul a year or two ago.

pabs3 5y ago

Not sure if it is on by default, but the Audio Input prefs mention two different types of echo cancelation.

IshKebab 5y ago
If it's on by default then it doesn't work. I can confirm that the audio quality is only theoretically better than Discord. In practice it is much worse due to echoes, poorly adjusted volumes, etc.
- zackmorris 5y ago
  I checked and they do have 2 types of echo cancellation (mixed/mono and multichannel): https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Audio#Echo_Cancellation https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Audio#Echo_Cancellation But looks like they maybe still have blockers that prevent them from enabling it by default: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/4178 https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/4178 Normally I would attribute this to these types of libraries evolving from the UNIX mindset, which almost always lacks sane defaults. But in this case, it looks like it has more to do with difficulties around maybe Apple's secrecy and patents around their own echo cancellation implementation. Hopefully I'm wrong about that. When I was working on a networked game around 2005, I dabbled with Speex and Vorbis. I found the Ogg maintainers to be rather hostile to my suggestions around echo cancellation. I suggested some stuff with autocorrolations to find the echo delay offset, since I had used them quite a bit as a contractor at hp. I was thinking that maybe they would let it dynamically adjust with little overhead, rather than needing a fixed delay between the microphone and speakers. I wanted this for the Mac, where there was no low-level way to access the mic and speaker hardware like on the PC, so I was concerned that there wouldn't be a fixed time offset available with Apple APIs. At the time, I thought they were just dismissing me as a n00b, but now I understand that they were just terribly overextended. These libraries are difficult to maintain, not because of any technological reason (this stuff was well-understood by the mid 1990s), but because of hardware/driver errata, constant undermining by big established OS players caving to entertainment lobbyists like the RIAA, and the constant threat of lawsuits by patent trolls. I would say the same thing about mesh networks or BitTorrent or Skype before Microsoft bought it or TikTok any of the other faces of the "real" internet that routes around censorship and inconveniences those who profit from the status quo.

blensor 5y ago

I am using a self hosted Jitsi-Meet server as the audio backend in VRWorkout. Their client runs in the browser and works pretty well. You don't get positional audio tho.

keb_ 5y ago

I honestly find the UX, clients, and echo cancelation to be great with Mumble and Mumla on mobile. I guess YMMV.