Teamspeak Alternative Mumble
Many gamers throughout the world use Teamspeak to communicate while gaming.Some may use other programs, like RaidCall or Ventrilo, but the majority is probably using Teamspeak to communicate with each other during games.
Many gaming clans use Teamspeak for professional gaming but it is also common among friends who play World of Warcraft together or any other online game where communication is key to success.
Mumble is an Open-Source multi-platform 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 if you are 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 may 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.
Update: Positional audio is now supported in many more games, including League of Legends, Counter Strike, Call of Duty, and dozens more.
Several other features have been added to the client in recent time. This includes in-game overlays to see who is talking or an easy to use setup wizard to configure your microphone properly.
Server admins may like that Mumble is free open source software, and that it is extendible through middleware programs.
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