Prior to Opus, Mumble used CELT.[2] This was a precursor to the Opus codec developed by Xiph.org, makers of the very well known Ogg container format and Vorbis audio codec.
Added noise suppression would also be great, especially a FOSS-based one (Discord uses AI-based noise suppression from Krisp [0] -- a Berkeley, CA based for-profit startup).
I'm curious if there are any FOSS community projects in this noise suppression space. Given the rapid rise in WFH culture post covid-19, I can see an explosion in demand for s/w products in this space.
Drives me up the walls when I mention discords awful quality and people just say "I don't know what you're talking about they have the same codec".
It's only a piece of the puzzle. Not to mention the constant robotting because some of their servers are melting or something.
Host your own voice comms :) Even the cheapest 2€ a month box can handle a decent sized party with no issues.
And why is there no passthrough mode setting for voice channels?
Plenty of people out there with decent usb mics and a cheap little dac/amp setup.
Convincing everyone else involved to switch over to it however is a near-insurmountable battle.
Many years ago I was playing on a friends Minecraft server, while in a then Skype call with some friends on the server
One user couldn't get Skype to work on their Arch Linux install, and proceeded to spend almost an hour badgering us and whining to switch to Mumble so they could "join the fun"
From our perspective, shifting our entire group conversation over to a brand new voice chat system just for one person seemed like an absolute joke. So they were left wanting
I love it, because I'm an engineer and know what all those buttons and sliders do. My friends? they didn't like it at all. Thus making the switchover even harder.
This issue has been mentioned in the past already, and I think Mumble devs acknowledged this in the past... having a well polished UI is so important for user adoption! Just throwing all technical choices to the user's face is rarely the right solution.
I used it with my friend in 2015 as a sort of galactic walkie-talkie on our phones -- he was in another country but we'd just walk around outside and talk to each other. It felt pretty futuristic at the time.
After a few minutes of continuous audio transmission though there would be a significant buildup of latency, so we developed the habit of saying "pineapple" to each other to measure the lag. Best record was 12 seconds.
Nice to see you had been having fun with it. Skype however had been there since a lot earlier, right? I guess that having to exolicitly "call" your friends removed a bit of that "walkie-talkie" feeling, but still...
It's just so bad in discord I don't know what they are doing
I always get angry when companies use it for commentary on esports because its just that damn awful
I know that a few open source games use it for in-game chat. Empty Epsilon [1], and my own Space Nerds in Space [2] both use it for this, and there are probably others.
[1] https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/ [2] https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/
I personally had it enabled (by accident) for over a week, and during that week I noticed people were either ignoring me or not hearing me. I discovered it was the latter when I disabled the noise suppression option. Krisp was suppressing my voice in addition to noise.
Other people I know who’ve tried it have had similar results, so I’m wondering if we’re using it wrong or if Krisp just isn’t worth using at this point.
The FSF even offers this as one of the few reasons you wouldn't use Copyleft. It actually would be better for society if everybody copy-pastes the Opus code and refuses to let you see their source code, than for them to use a proprietary codec instead.
> Speex was the first audio codec we used, until it was superseded by CELT in 2009 (Mumble 1.2.0), which in turn was superseded by Opus in 2011 (Mumble 1.2.4).
> We retained support for [Speex] for 10 years and we believe all active servers are currently using Opus.