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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

This was normal back in the days of IRC and Mumble. I should try introducing mumble into our company, come to think of it. I remember not understanding the client-side TLS certificate thing, so like, it had strong encryption way ahead of its time and the UI was basically as smooth as it could be because we all made it onto the server, even if we didn't understand what it was and the server just accepted any cert.

It's a good reminder indeed, I hadn't considered the old gaming toolkit we used as teenagers and I work with 100% technical people that can figure out an apt install mumble

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Mumble's latency is unbeatable imo, it's basically their main focus and shows.

The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560

If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.

I think in the case of Mumble, the chat feature is intended to be used to let people fix sound issues, nothing more.

This sort of is yet another data point related to a conundrum: on one hand, applications that integrate multiple functionalities are convenient but there's always one or more functionality that doesn't fit your needs; on the other hand, applications that focus on one functionality do it well, but you have to hand pick one-by-one to fit all your needs, perhaps add some glue scripts/plugins to make them work nicely together, and this is inconvenient (in particular if you are not alone and not in an organization that "dictates" those choices) and a slow process.

Basically it is Office365/LibreOffice/Emacs or Browsers (with plugins to add chat, email clients, etc.), issue trackers (sometimes feature Wikis and more), Git online front ends (sometimes offer Wikis and issue trackers), versus e.g. raw Git, Vim/Notepad/Nano, bare-bones browsers (Surf, Midori browsers), ...

I favor the dedicate apps for things I do a lot - usually I eventually know them pretty well and I have the know-how to make them interoperate. For more casual stuff, I'm like the random user - the convenience just wins.

But for communication applications, as long as people jump the bandwagon of the latest private service provided "for free", you have to go with the flow or only be the nerd that talks with nerds on obscure networks.

Be it bad ears or a pretty rudimentary testing method, but the experience we had at a lan was that we could hear each other through mumble before hearing a shout from across a room.

I know that feeling. For work, I have to do basically everything in a VM, but even on the host the input latency (as measured by 1000 fps camera filming the keyboard with the screen in the background, while I strike a key) is not great or anything. Being used to this latency causes me to feel like the disk encryption boot screen shows the asterisk before I truly typed the letter of the password. (Relevant: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/)

I am on my way to bed but, damn, you're getting me curious about the delay that Mumble has versus speed of sound. Knowing it uses Speex ("This is an example of Speex ..." x100) which has a minimum delay of 30ms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speex), and that you have <1ms ping on gigabit LAN so ignoring that by comparison (even if you>mumble>someoneelse is 2 hops), sound travels...

    $ qalc
    > 340m/s * 30ms
    (340 * (meter / second)) * (30 * millisecond) = 10.54 m

That would be the absolute minimum possible (unless modern Mumble switched to Opus and you used that version) for it to be true. But, considering the first paragraph, I am also very ready to accept it just sounds like Mumble is quicker just because it's so contrary to the norm.

If you say it was ~11+ meters (36 ft), I may be curious enough to create a test setup :p. But I'm assuming you mean the person sitting next to you, not someone who put Mumble on huge speakers across a hall.

It would have been five or six meters with someone speaking loudly into the mic and someone else with one headphone cup on. So you'd need another person to test.

It was also in 2009 so it could even have been Celt rather than speed or opus

> The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus

This is my complaint about Discord and such as well, though. People seem to love platforms where what you typed last week is never looked at again and isn't searchable/accessible from a regular web search. HN is also moving more and more in that direction: threads always dropped off very fast (matter of up to 3 days if you have a top-of-the-year popular thread) but then, at some point, editing was restricted to only be 2 hours (countless times I run into not being able to add a correction or addition, so posts are now less good/useful in posterity), and last week I noticed I couldn't reply to someone anymore after 18 days (they had replied to me, I had finally gotten around to checking their suggestion, and wanted to reply back ... alas).

I used to use Skype about 10 years ago for playing, then raidcall, then I eventually realized I could host a teamspeak server for the server I was hosting, so we got a non-profit license and hosted our TS server.

I played Eve Online and had to use Mumble. Damn, I wish more people used Mumble, it's such a nice piece of software and it's open source! If only we could have text chat mixed with the audio backend from Mumble, all this together in one app, I believe it would be amazing.

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