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Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

Discord is okay as an "all in one" package, but purely for voice communications falls far behind alternatives like Teamspeak.

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Mumble / Murmur [1][2] is a nice self hosted alternative to Teamspeak and there are also many public servers. Rock solid, great voice quality, UX is still being refined, not as frictionless as Discord for new users, but I keep one running for family to fall back to. The server is just routing text / voice, so it scales to VERY large numbers of users with little resource usage.

[1] - https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page

[2] - https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble

> Mumble / Murmur [1][2] is a nice self hosted alternative to Teamspeak

You mean an open source alternative, because TS is already self hosted.

Correct.

Mumble also has the lowest latency of any VOIP software out there, at least to my knowledge. It's something the developers prioritize a great deal.

In my experience, this improves the quality of every conversation. They just flow more naturally.

I wish other solutions would prioritize latency. Skype went very noticeably backward after they switched away from P2P.

I agree completely. I found what helps even more is to use fq_codel + google's BBR congestion control on the server and increase the netdev budget about 4x the default values and the latency remains very low with more people connected.

Define far behind? Discord solves the low latency communication problem for me like 99.99% of the time without any sort of issue. I don't really see how you're claiming it falls far behind if the difference between it and Teamspeak/Mumble/Vent or whatever is so razor thin. I've barely noticed any issues in the past 3 years of Discord, and it was the same with the previous 4 years of Mumble and however many years of Vent and Xfire before that.

Constant server issues, hard to find server regions that work well across continents at the same time, very limited support for hotkeys, ...

Huh, I don't know if I've ever had server issues with Discord outside of the whole thing going down once or twice in the past couple years. I've heard people complain about it and it's baffling to me. Maybe it's a regional thing, which would be unfortunate, but the USW server work great as far as I can tell and I voice chat on disc almost every night for multiple hours.

I also have everything I want hotkeyed, so I still think that "far behind" is a huge stretch at best.

Our raid group (spread across Europe) has communications break down about 1 in 6/7 raid nights. Its quickly solved by swapping to US East but the latency is not great for our Eastern European players. We used to be able to bounce between Western Europe and Central Europe to avoid problems but discord recently pooled all the european servers claiming it would help solve issues like this, but it hasn't really.

Similar/same experience here: Friends are in Europe, I'm in SEA / Singapore. We randomly have the robot voice or people cutting out and then start the 'switch region' dance. Which might fix the problem for a while, but messes with the latency quite a bit then.

Does Teamspeak allow each user to set the volume of any other user they hear separately? This has made discord the current choice for our group of friends.

Yes.

Can even set 3D settings for each friend, which can be handy. For some of the cooler things you can do with Teamspeak through extensions see the Arma 3 ACRE plugin.

http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=19324 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1q4NgyCMs

One of the biggest things that Teamspeak has over Discord is its ability to do compression and normalization on incoming audio streams. Between those two, it doesn't matter how poor or inconsistant a microphone setup the other party has, it sounds good.

That's alone is my biggest wish out of Discord.

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