Let’s Get Ready To Mumble
Talking over the internet isn’t new. But there is a new kid on the block: Mumble, a group voice chat system. What can it do for us that we don’t currently have? Will we see Mumble displace Skype or IRC? Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge discuss the chat client and new ways of working that it might give our community.
If you’ve used Mumble, or things like it, join the conversation! Tell us how you think we could be better with tools like this!
30 Comments to “Let’s Get Ready To Mumble”
Leave a Reply
Stephen Hawkins? Jono, dude…
Haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but my experience with Mumble is quite fine – we’ve adopted it for a 300+ player clan on a game that’s cross-platform (windows, mac, linux). Sound quality is great, it works for everyone who plays the game, we don’t have any limits on player amounts and a member is hosting it from their home – so it’s quite a seamless solution.
There was once an issue with the overlay for linux, but a clan member made a patch to mumble that fixed it and it’s already been accepted. Go OSS.
Switched to Mumble since 1.2 was released late last year. Much better sound quality than Vent / TS (2) / Skype. TS 3 uses the same codec…CELT. Interface could use some work but it’s easily the lowest latency and highest quality VOIP client of its type (along with TS3).
Forgot to mention, I use multiplay. As mumble is FOSS you can get a 10 person server for about £10-15 / year. Not free but hey bandwidth isn’t free.
How secure is Mumble?
Just been browsing about mumble and came across the release notes for version 1.2
http://mumble.sourceforge.net/1.2.0
It appears that you can use user certificates to identify people. So that would cover secure user authentication.
I’ve yet to find anything about connection security, although there are a few references to SSL in the changelog:
http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Changelog
And someone on IRC has told me that both the control and voice data is encrypted.
I haven’t tried it, but what is there about Mumble that would make it unsuitable as a conventional person to person VOIP use? The people that I know that use VOIP for personal use (as opposed to business use) only ever talk to the same few people. Grandmothers use it to talk to their grandchildren and things like that. Having those sorts of calls as conference calls would actually be a big advantage.
If you were going to do that, then why not an Ubuntu One Mumble service? Server capacity and bandwidth cost money so it couldn’t be free (as in no-charge), but if anyone had a problem with that they could set up their own server.
The issue with person-to-person is that you can’t stop someone else joining the room (much like IRC channels), unless you set up a server which is just for the two of you.
I just checked the docs and it seems you are correct and it wouldn’t be good for private conversations between two parties. Users have to be registered and authenticated to join a “group”, but setting up groups for pairs of people doesn’t seem practical.
However, for what I had in mind that isn’t really a problem. If a family had a group where Grandma and the grandchildren can all talk to each other at the same time that would be exactly how you would want it to work anyway. For the typical person, a group for “family” and a group for “friends” would be all they would want.
FWIW, you can put “passwords” on channels, but it’s a tiny bit unintuitive to use – putting a password in the box when you create a channel just creates an “access token group” to which it allows access to the channel, then adds a rule to deny everyone else. It even works on temporary channels if you pick one of the public servers that allows you to create your own channel.
The downside is that actually joining the channel is counter-intuitive right now – you have to click the server menu, pick “access tokens”, then type the password into the list – you’ll then have all the access the access token group has.
The reason for this design is because the devs can’t really figure out a way that doesn’t lend itself to leaking of your access tokens if you forget what server you’re on and an “enter password” dialog box comes up.
To answer a few other questions: Mumble’s control channel (where everything but voice is transmitted) uses OpenSSL – the voice channel uses OCB which I’m led to believe cuts latency a bit.
Re: Podcasting with Mumble – you guys will probably love 1.2.3. If everything goes according to plan, the beginnings of a recording function should hopefully make it into the 1.2.3 release. To my knowledge, the plan for recording involves placing each stream into it’s own Ogg container, which can then be dragged as individual tracks in something like Audacity, so that you can control pans, attenuate unwanted utterances, and just generally do all kinds of neat stuff you couldn’t do without essentially a multi-track recording of the podcast.
In the interests of full-disclosure: I’m a Mumble host and contributor.
Shall I post the link to Mumble’s website? http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Main_Page
Wow, that sounds really cool. Will definitely check it out. Sounds like it even supports echo-cancellation too, which is a big issue if you don’t want to use headsets (e.g. group-to-group use).
Actually, Aq, Jono, you said you’d used Skype by just leaving it running in the background and it felt very office-like – was that using headphones+mic or just a computer mic and speakers?
Thanks for the heads up on this one.
You know, that almost looks like a TARDIS for the Master in the pic too, akshully.
I kinda like the idea of using mumble for increasing the fidelity of remote work groups…a project oriented party line. If you feel comfortable with your peers–like to the point of sharing crude jokes–I can see how this could really take some guesswork out reading irc, chat or email, it would a a very large increase in communication.
I don’t see it helping in a more corporate environment, where you might have bosses listening at any given moment, keeping mumble running in your office destroys what privacy you need to express your anger. If you’re swearing at your code or just exercising some healthy cynicism, anyone popping into the conversation is highly likely to…get you fired.
I see mumble as a possibility to keep a distributed war-room conversation going…like conference-room to server-room. Or during a product launch. Or a coding sprint where you need to get groups of people together talking. Wearing headsets on skype for hours would be a frikkin’ joke when coding.
True thought. On the other hand, who wants to work in a corporate office, eh?
Who does? Well, good with the bad, you know. I’ve worked in corporate offices where “bosses” were mostly absent and didn’t mind, or left unlocked, their liquor cabinet, allowed you to play music sans headphones, had lan games at lunch. Alternatively, being a parent, a nice quiet corporate office (where you have co-workers that actually concentrate) is far more productive than getting interrupted by the family every time a glass of milk needs to be poured.
Mumble (and Murmur) sound excellent. For native and near-native speakers of the same language, it could be an awesome tool for conference calls etc. When combined with tools like PasteBin and collabrative editors, it really could increase a project/team’s productivity. Where people can’t communicate verbally at the same pace though, it could be a disadvantage. For example, if several native speakers in a group switch to Murmur in lieu of IRC, this may cut out those who are not native speakers but were able to get along OK in the written word – i.e. IRC – because they don’t have to deal with the problem of local accents. etc.
Agreed. Voice chats are much, much higher bandwidth than IRC, but you have to be able to keep up with that bandwidth…
Derrr, I don’t see the point. I spend most of my days avoiding conference calls… I think Jono even brought up trying to avoid calls the other day. I like to actually get things done.
The problem with things like Murmur, while they work with established sort of groups, getting people on and using it, or inviting someone new is sort of a pain in the ass. The reason people use products like Freeswitch or Asterisk is that they can be adapted to the way people work, rather than adapting people to the way an application works. You can’t exactly say “oh, let’s bring this person on because we need some input” with something like mumble, but you can sms someone a bridge number, email a sip address, or even bring someone into a bigbluebutton conversation.
Speaking of, if you haven’t tried bigbluebutton, you’re completely missing out. It’s a FOSS alternative to Adobe Connect/Webex/etc. It’s a little resource heavy on the server side, but completely awesome for what it provides: http://bigbluebutton.org/
Jono, how about adding mumble to Lernid? Could be a great addition for group training.
I also like the idea of adding murmur as a paid UbuntuOne service.
In answer to the question “what can we do with mumble?” I immediately thought it would be a perfect way for me to conduct study sessions or discussion groups in my online classes (I’m a music professor). I’m definitely going to look into this…
Thanks for the great shows, guys.
I seem to recall Skype did a similar thing a few years ago. Everybody went “Cool, this is going to be the next big thing”. Then everybody went to join the channels and went “Cool, this actually works”. Then everybody suddenly realised they were talking live to an audience, realised that’s actually quite intimidating. Then it died on it’s arse.
There might be something about Mumble that’s different that I haven’t appreciated. But don’t be surprised if this doesn’t have a simlilar problem to Skype’s effort.
I agree with many of the sentiments discussed thus far. When i heard the podcast I immediately thought that Mumble could be a useful tool to add to or replace IRC meetings. I do take the point that users must be fluent in the language of choice but I do believe that a lot more ground could be covered in a Mumble meeting as opposed to an IRC meeting. I also agree that, on the server side, Murmur could provide a savvy company with a revenue stream.
The reason Mumble “just works” through firewalls, unlike e.g. SIP calls, is because it has a central server. When everyone’s connecting to one place, there are far fewer problems. It’s peer-to-peer which is the trick (and, in fact, Skype cheats by borrowing the bandwidth of well-connected Skype clients to use them as a server!).
I setup murmur on my server a couple of months ago to play around with, and have used it on and off since then. Works rather well, so long as you can get everyone’s Mumble setup configured correctly, as I had a number of people who had issues with getting the audio to work – although they were all running Windows. Every time it involved some weird setup on the advanced options – sorry can’t remember what it was if someone runs into it. If anyone is interested in running a murmur server on Ubuntu, I wrote up a guide when I did it. http://www.eugenemdavis.com/thoughts/node/10
Sorry I posted this way late, been a bit bogged down lately, just caught the show today.
Anyone: I’m a co-host on a 3 person podcast and we just started using mumble instead of skpye. Can anyone help me learn to record all three voices on my end. One other guy does the recording for the actual podcast. I just want another copy of the audio. I have a mac and can use garageband, but am also somewhat familiar with audacity. Thanks!
Assuming you are using Ubuntu with Pulse audio, I figured out how to record Mumble’s audio a few months ago. If you are interested in my notes on this, send me an email at eugene.mal.davis@gmail.com
So I just set up mumble and rented a server and stuff, but what I’m wondering is that there aren’t many softwares that support recording function. the new version of mumble does but the server I rented is 1.2.2 so I can’t do that. Any advice for me? Thanks!
Version 1.2.3 will be able to record sessions, it’ll be released any day now, or you can use the developer snapshot which already has it.
I’m surprised the existing Mumble server providers weren’t mentioned, there are several, though there isn’t one that’s considered ‘the Freenode of Mumble’ since I don’t think they offer much for free. They are all also very gaming oriented.
I think the developers have missed a trick by not looking more at business audio conferencing. I found this site because it’s one of the highest Google results for “Mumble meeting”, just mentioning a usages other than gaming on their wiki would help.
I’ve been wondering if there’s any way to interface Mumble with Asterisk (or Asterisk with Mumble) so as to bridge the two – either perhaps a mumble->SIP bridge, or a “chan_mumble” for Asterisk.