Many gamers throughout the world use Teamspeak to communicate while gaming. Many gaming clans use Teamspeak for professional gaming but it is also common among friends who play their nightly World of Warcraft session.
Mumble is an Open-Source multi-plattform Teamspeak alternative that comes, like Teamspeak, as a client and server application which is distributed together in the Windows version. The gaming community usually sets up the server versions of Teamspeak and Mumble on Linux servers on the Internet so that everyone can connect to them all the time.
A Windows server would only make sense for playing the game for a few hours but there are probably users who run a Windows client 24/7 as well.
Mumble has several features that might convince gamers to switch from Teamspeak to it. It uses encryption which is nice but probably nothing that gamers are that excited about. A more interesting feature is positional audio for supported games.
What that means is that a user in Mumble will hear the voices of his mates coming from the direction their character is standing in the game. This is currently supported in World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2.
Everything comes down to bandwidth requirements and quality of speed in the end. Mumble is using a default 45.4 kbit/s which can be increased or reduced to suit specific needs.
Mumble is available for Windows, Apple Macintosh and various Linux distributions.
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