Watch out Ventrilo, Mumble in the mix.

Posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 and filed under Applications.

The guy’s over at wow.com have done a pretty good writeup on their blog post Ventrilo vs. Mumble¹, but considering it’s not a site that every single WoW player visits regularly, or something most non-warcrafters even have a reason to visit, I wanted to take a few minutes to highlight their post and help introduce you to Mumble, a low latency VOIP program for gaming. This is an application that is mostly unknown in the MMORPG world, where Ventrilo and Teamspeak have dominated, it’s far better known in the FPS circles where the extremely low latency helps give it a competitive advantage when calling out those enemy snipers and getting teammates over to help defend your bunker.

Mumble, unlike Ventrillo or Teamspeak, was specifically created with low latency in mind, and along with an excellent voice quality there is just as much lag as you would expect on a normal land-lined phone call. The latency is so low in fact that it allows for perfectly normal conversations, and yelling “Meteor in five seconds” actually means “Meteor in five seconds”; not “Meteor in three seconds by the time you hear this”. It also features Auto normalization, which to me is a huge benefit because that means I won’t have to sit there every time a new user joins chat, or I join a new guilds chat, and manually adjust the voice volumes for everyone to be an equal level. No more whispered call out’s I can barely hear, and no more eardrum shattering hunter’s crying about their pet dying. If you’ve ever had to sit there and go through the “Ok, say something now”, following by some tweaking and then another “Ok, say something again.”, you will fully appreciate this subtle but amazing awesome feature. Mumble normalizes everyone’s volume automatically on the server end, and does it right.

I highly suggest heading over and reading their full article which goes a little more in-depth into some of the features and functions of this great VOIP program, and then going to sourceforge² and grabbing a copy for yourself and your guild to play around with to see if it fits your need. Once this gets a little more widespread in the WOW world I definitely see it becoming the new requirement, so when your applying to a new guild and you see “Mumble is used for guild communication, do you have this installed”, at least now you will have some idea of what they are talking about, and hopefully your savvy enough to see the greatness of it and be able to throw a big fat CHECK down next to the question.

Jake@MOGS