[HN Gopher] Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice...
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Mumble: Open-Source, Low Latency, High Quality Voice Chat
Author : danboarder
Score : 502 points
Date : 2021-06-27 05:41 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mumble.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mumble.info)
| LinuxBender wrote:
| UX issues aside, one plus for Mumble/Murmur is privacy. Should
| Discord some day be purchased by one of the big players, I would
| expect them to follow the path of Zoom and add voice
| transcription thus allowing them to not only save text chats
| forever, but also save everything that everyone says. Their user-
| base are already asking for it [1] One would have more control
| over this on a Murmur _Mumble_ server. In my experience, people
| are more relaxed with things they say vs. things they type. There
| is the assumption that only the people visible in the channel are
| listening. It is only a matter of time before voice transcription
| is standard on all the large platforms and I am not confident
| that this data will be protected properly.
|
| [1] - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/community/posts/3600634...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I would expect them to follow the path of Zoom and add voice
| transcription thus allowing them to not only save text chats
| forever, but also save everything that everyone says"_
|
| It might not be transcribed, but I'd be very surprised if they
| didn't already save everything that everyone said (in audio
| format).
|
| Some of it is probably already transcribed too. It's just that
| doing it for every possible accent and language is not easy
| without training, so they probably don't have everything
| transcribed, but some of it probably is and the rest is just
| waiting in archives for when they want to give it more
| attention.
| [deleted]
| omk wrote:
| Since the pandemic, have been using a mumble setup for our team
| to have seamless interactions with each other. It is a lot easier
| to ask a query over PTT than typing away in a chat window. People
| can easily deafen themselves when busy or in focus more. It just
| brings the office space back to life.
| Lammy wrote:
| I like https://umurmur.net/ since it can run totally headless at
| the cost of some of Murmur's features. Mainline Murmur (the
| Mumble server) requires QT5 and mDNSResponder and various DB
| drivers and even D-Bus if you look at it crossways
| zxzax wrote:
| The D-Bus RPC is considered deprecated in favor of Ice and can
| be compiled out.
| broodbucket wrote:
| umurmur good. I never did anything fancy with my server but I
| never noticed anything that umurmur didn't have, meanwhile it
| used virtually zero resources.
| a254613e wrote:
| Being open source, low latency, and having high quality audio
| doesn't do much when the clients are absolutely horrible,
| everything has horrible UX, and absolutely zero echo cancelation.
| keb_ wrote:
| I honestly find the UX, clients, and echo cancelation to be
| great with Mumble and Mumla on mobile. I guess YMMV.
| blensor wrote:
| I am using a self hosted Jitsi-Meet server as the audio backend
| in VRWorkout. Their client runs in the browser and works pretty
| well. You don't get positional audio tho.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Maybe there is potential for Mumble to improve going forward ?
| foxpurple wrote:
| It's almost impossible for them to compete with discord at
| this point. Discord is so good it has raised the bar far
| beyond what foss developers can make in their free time.
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| Discord audio is terrible and unreliable, I don't know how
| people use it for anything other than casual chatting.
|
| Maybe people are just impressed solely by UI but they are
| apples and oranges wrt quality.
| fishmaster wrote:
| People use it precisely because the audio is great and
| just works.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| We all take turns streaming the driver POV in sim racing
| for multiple hours in driver swapped endurance. I think
| there's a whole category of esports coming only made
| possible by discord. Works flawlessly.
| truth_ wrote:
| I regularly take part in programming groups, paper
| reading groups, and book reading groups with Discord. It
| works flawlessly without any problem. Screen-sharing,
| video chat, voice all work properly as expected.
|
| I also admin several servers, some of which are
| completely unrelated to tech and non-tech people find it
| seamless to use.
|
| And their noise suppression just works. I have only seen
| better video quality in Google Duo, and better voice
| quality in 4G VoLTE calls.
|
| Only three issues I have with Discord-
|
| 1. It requires high speed internet connection. How high?
| People with 3 MBPS reported seamless use.
|
| 2. The clients are resource hogs. The mobile clients drop
| the battery too quick, and takes too much RAM in PCs.
| Although the latter has improved with updates.
|
| 3. I am concerned about privacy. Discord is as close-
| sourced as it gets.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| Certainly possible to be better than Discord. I tried
| Discord once for a friend's virtual party. Horrible sound
| quality, horrible connection issues both on Windows client
| and iOS app - not to speak of fully pegging the CPUs for a
| video chat app. The experience was far worse than a Zoom or
| Teams call.
|
| Maybe for 24/7 gamers who have tweaked it until they found
| the right setup, Discord "just works", but for me it seemed
| unfit for purpose.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| I've had the exact opposite experience with Discord,
| personally. Flawless streaming of 1080p60 games, screens,
| voice & video chat. Text chat/channels are intuitive.
| Embeds just work.
|
| Teams on the other hand has a terrible UI for text chat,
| but the voice/video meetings are fine.
| undfg wrote:
| If you had horrible sound quality and horrible connection
| issues with discord you are in the absolute minority.
| lapnitnelav wrote:
| No, I have been hanging around in Discord for a while now
| and I've run quite often into issues with connection
| issues for specific servers (I guess some clusters going
| down) and them being OOO for a while.
|
| Mumble on the other hand tends to be pretty reliable and
| comes back up in a few seconds anyway whenever it fails.
| Duralias wrote:
| A friend and I both got really nice microphones but when
| in a discord call you can not tell the difference between
| them and an above average wireless headset microphone
| (these are usually much worse than their wired
| equivalent).
|
| Recording the audio in windows you can easily tell the
| difference between them, but not over discord. Even tried
| upping the bitrate but it made no noticeable difference.
| boudin wrote:
| It's a matter of taste I guess, but I find Discord UI
| horrible. It's also eating way too much resources for what
| it does.
| ekianjo wrote:
| i dont understand the point where it competes in the same
| space ? mumble does not have ads, does not sell your data,
| and certainly does not need to run ontop of Electron.
| anticensor wrote:
| > mumble does not have ads
|
| Discord does not have ads either.
| rijoja wrote:
| I do not find Discord that impressive. It is very slow on
| less powerful hardware, which really shouldn't happen for
| software of this type.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Discord isn't good though.
|
| It's just There.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| What makes it not good?
| unpopularopp wrote:
| HN: not open source = bad. See all the topics about
| Excel.
|
| Some people just can't accept that proprietary software
| can be and actually is good.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Nah it just isn't good. Or especially bad. Like I said,
| Discord is just There. The only reason to use it is
| because others are already using it. But nothing about
| the product design jumps out as "good."
| sundvor wrote:
| Discord is good but has some infuriating issues such as not
| recording device IDs when mapping buttons - eg for muting
| or swapping PTT/voice activated. Eg. press
| `\\\usb2\button1` - and it will be triggered by _ANY_ USB
| device with a `button1`.
|
| It's a recorded (sorry) issue, they don't seem to care. My
| use case is simracing with a couple of button boxes in
| addition to those on the wheel; the outcomes of this issue
| can be incredibly random (and frustrating) mid race.
|
| Also (especially applicable if you host a small community)
| to get high quality streams you must put a staggering
| amount of nitro dollars in on a monthly basis.
| npteljes wrote:
| I don't know how the commenters below you miss your point
| consistently. Discord is featureful and each feature is
| only a couple of clicks away, and every nitty-gritty is
| nicely abstracted away under the UI. Surely it was a bit of
| time to get the hang of their UX, but I can't seriously see
| _any_ FOSS software to do audio, video, screen sharing, IM
| with groups and users, all packed into a nice consistent
| package. For one, Discord must have a serious backend and
| constant support to back this all up. The other thing is
| that joining is like zero effort. You click on an invite
| link, it only asks you a handle, and bam, you land on the
| server, ready to go. And you have several ways to
| "upgrade", you can register your handle, download and use
| the desktop app. With a buttery smooth transition to both.
|
| I can see FOSS software outperform Discord, if you pick an
| aspect, like "low latency audio". But if someone wants to
| make FOSS successful, they better focus on the user
| experience. People sacrifice a good bit of everything else,
| just to get a better UX, and the more developers realize
| this, the more potential their projects have to succeed.
| southerntofu wrote:
| What about Jitsi or BigBlueButton? They're as easy to use
| a Discord if not easier and are entirely free-software
| you can selfhost. Plus if you don't want to selfhost it's
| super easy to find a host for those solutions.
| gsich wrote:
| Jitsi is not the same.
| npteljes wrote:
| I have yet to try them. I'd love to unseat proprietary IM
| services in my circle.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Please do! Only problem is you can't use them through the
| Tor network, but if that's not a requirement for you (and
| it's anyway not possible with discord either to my
| knowledge) then these solutions will probably make you
| very happy.
|
| The last version of BBB released a few weeks ago
| apparently reduced resource-usage by up to two thirds
| server-side and brought in long-awaited features. Or so i
| heard from friendly hosting collectives, who definitely
| recommend to give it a go.
| enlyth wrote:
| Yeah everyone here bashing Discord doesn't understand
| that the voice chat aspect is like 5% of what makes it
| appealing.
|
| You can build actual _communities_ on Discord, it's not
| just about the voice chat. It brings the people together
| in a way they can share rich content in one space.
|
| If you're on voice chat you will very often want to
| interact with them by sending images, videos or links
| back and forth, and can do this seamlessly by using
| Ctrl-V.
|
| This is why IRC pales in comparison to modern chat
| solutions, and proponents will start rambling about open
| protocols or whatever stuff the end user doesn't care
| about. Can you paste a screenshot into the chat? Thought
| so.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Color me skeptical that being able to have a video or an
| image show up in the chat is what makes a community.
|
| It can be nice to see videos and images, and it can be
| annoying. Quite often videos and images dumb down the
| conversation as people post memes instead of saying
| anything meaningful.
|
| It can also be handy to see the image right there and not
| have to click on a link to open it in your web browser to
| see it, but that just makes the experience a bit more
| seamless and convenient, and is not something that is
| going to make or break a community.
|
| Plenty of communities have formed on IRC.. big and small,
| even without inline images and video.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| This sounds like you're limiting the idea of a
| "community" to something akin to niche FOSS projects, not
| generalized interests like Discord is more commonly used
| for. IRC is way less intuitive for building such things,
| especially for the vast majority of users - who don't
| even know what IRC is.
| calpaterson wrote:
| As an occasional user of discord I cannot understand that
| at all. It is one of the most confusing UIs I have ever
| used, everything from finding the settings to joining or
| telling what channel you are connected to is done in a
| "unique UI paradigm". Quality of calls is good but the app
| is mental
| knownjorbist wrote:
| You are probably in a very, very small minority there.
| The only confusion I've had with the interface is in the
| minutiae of some niche settings.
| foxpurple wrote:
| Discord is in between casual and power user. Once you are
| on 5 groups and using many of the features you wouldn't
| want it any other way.
| fishmaster wrote:
| Discord is quite easy to use for dozens of people I know,
| most of whom aren't programmers or heavy PC users. It
| just works and it's great, especially the noise
| cancelling.
| apetrovic wrote:
| And yet my 12 years old daughter use Discord with her
| friends without asking me a thing.
| trampypizza wrote:
| In my experience, discord was better than the previous
| options for a few reasons.
|
| A) it's free, as opposed to a vent or TS server, which
| while they are not expensive, it's still a barrier to
| setting one up.
|
| B) the free tier has quite a lot of functionality without
| paying for servers, even for a lot of players (like a
| World of Warcraft guild).
|
| C) it merged voice Comms with a community hub where
| people could communicate and share things relevant to
| their game (to use the WoW scenario again, raid
| organising, upcoming patch discussion, guides and other
| helpful information) in an organised and central
| location.
|
| I recognise there is a bunch of issues with discord, I've
| had it have complete melt downs when the voice systems
| have broken, it can be a real resource hog, and don't get
| me started on the security and privacy (it's not great),
| however because of the additional functionality I still
| think it's a great bit of software.
|
| I'm so glad I don't have to be in Warcraft guild Facebook
| groups anymore!
| calpaterson wrote:
| These three points are all well and good but they don't
| contradict my original points: Discord's UI is
| exceptionally confusing and requires specific knowledge
| to operate it. This isn't a field with brilliant UI
| either: eg it's often confusing whether you're muted or
| unmuted on most videoconferencing programs. Even so,
| Discord is definitely the most confusing
| videoconferencing UI I can remember using. I'm sure that
| harms adoption greatly, even if it is still very popular.
| trampypizza wrote:
| Oh I don't disagree with you!
|
| My purpose was not to suggest you were wrong, just
| present my experience and thoughts about why it's become
| so widely used _despite_ the issues you've raised.
|
| I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the
| perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives.
| That has certainly been my experience, which I appreciate
| is a single data point.
| calpaterson wrote:
| > I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the
| perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives.
|
| I'm sure you're right! The robustness of Discord's call
| quality definitely seems to be much better than average
| (though a lot of this comes down to people's local
| networking hardware).
| [deleted]
| daptaq wrote:
| Somewhat unrelated, but can you explain to me why every
| small youtuber or github project seems to have a discord
| server nowadays? Do people really need to talk all the
| time, with every group of people they interact with?
| hrydgard wrote:
| Many projects, including mine, just use it without the
| voice features, as a modern replacement for IRC.
|
| It does work great for that.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" It does work great for that."_
|
| My main problem with Discord is that I can't get logs out
| of it.
|
| I want to archive all the channels I'm in, so I can
| search the archives offline using regular text search
| tools. But as far as I know there's no way to do that.
| (The closest I've come is copying and pasting text out of
| it, screen by screen, which is a very long and tedious
| process.)
|
| The Discord client has rudimentary search capability but
| you have to be online and connected to the Discord server
| you want to search to use it, and there's no guarantee
| it'll continue to work indefinitely, and if you ever
| leave that server your ability to search it is gone.
|
| Scrolling through chat history is also incredibly slow
| (especially if you have to scroll more than a little, as
| it slows down significantly when you scroll back a
| certain amount and it has to load the chat history from
| the server).
|
| The Discord client is a resource hog too, and on my old
| slow laptop I dread playing a game and having Discord
| open at the same time as this combination will often slow
| down the game to the point that it's unplayable.
|
| None of these problems exist with IRC.
|
| With IRC you own your own data, and if you want to log
| and search offline it's super easy to do. IRC clients
| like weechat are super lightweight so don't cause any
| problems when running along with other apps, and
| scrolling back through chat history is lightning fast.
|
| The main thing that Discord has going for it as an IRC
| replacement is that it can show images and videos inline
| in the chat, and it has a nice looking client. But having
| your data locked away and at the whims of a corporation
| and having to suffer through all the other annoyances and
| inconveniences of the Discord client makes it a poor
| replacement for IRC for me.
| Duralias wrote:
| From a creator perspective it makes a great place to
| build a stronger community, as you are on more equal
| ground with your followers and all your followers now
| have a place to talk about what they follow. Hard to be
| "equals" on twitter or on youtube. For github projects it
| depends, but it is usually tech support, but one where
| more often than not other users/followers will be helping
| other users/followers, which leaves the creator with less
| support work.
|
| From a follower perspective, it is a place that usually
| garners like minded individuals, meaning you can often
| find friends/people to do stuff with. It is also a very
| good way to hear news about whatever you are following, a
| lot of server have a ton of users but little activity
| because most people are there for the news.
|
| The reason why people don't just create forum websites is
| mostly because it costs money and secondly because going
| to a website is more cumbersome than opening an app that
| holds all these "forums".
| AntwaneB wrote:
| Mumble has been around for more than 15 years, if they were
| going to improve on those it would have already been done.
| gsich wrote:
| They don't get payed, so this is not an assumption I would
| make.
| rareform wrote:
| They did a full UI overhaul a year or two ago.
| daptaq wrote:
| I'd say a certain, little pandemic situation might spur
| interest in improving the FOSS situation when it comes to
| VOIP.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| The pandemic has been ongoing for quite some time.
| daptaq wrote:
| And Mumble has published a release, and is preparing a
| new one.
| [deleted]
| pabs3 wrote:
| Not sure if it is on by default, but the Audio Input prefs
| mention two different types of echo cancelation.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If it's on by default then it doesn't work. I can confirm
| that the audio quality is only theoretically better than
| Discord. In practice it is much worse due to echoes, poorly
| adjusted volumes, etc.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I checked and they do have 2 types of echo cancellation
| (mixed/mono and multichannel):
|
| https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Audio#Echo_Cancellation
|
| But looks like they maybe still have blockers that prevent
| them from enabling it by default:
|
| https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/4178
|
| Normally I would attribute this to these types of libraries
| evolving from the UNIX mindset, which almost always lacks
| sane defaults. But in this case, it looks like it has more
| to do with difficulties around maybe Apple's secrecy and
| patents around their own echo cancellation implementation.
| Hopefully I'm wrong about that.
|
| When I was working on a networked game around 2005, I
| dabbled with Speex and Vorbis. I found the Ogg maintainers
| to be rather hostile to my suggestions around echo
| cancellation. I suggested some stuff with autocorrolations
| to find the echo delay offset, since I had used them quite
| a bit as a contractor at hp. I was thinking that maybe they
| would let it dynamically adjust with little overhead,
| rather than needing a fixed delay between the microphone
| and speakers. I wanted this for the Mac, where there was no
| low-level way to access the mic and speaker hardware like
| on the PC, so I was concerned that there wouldn't be a
| fixed time offset available with Apple APIs.
|
| At the time, I thought they were just dismissing me as a
| n00b, but now I understand that they were just terribly
| overextended. These libraries are difficult to maintain,
| not because of any technological reason (this stuff was
| well-understood by the mid 1990s), but because of
| hardware/driver errata, constant undermining by big
| established OS players caving to entertainment lobbyists
| like the RIAA, and the constant threat of lawsuits by
| patent trolls.
|
| I would say the same thing about mesh networks or
| BitTorrent or Skype before Microsoft bought it or TikTok
| any of the other faces of the "real" internet that routes
| around censorship and inconveniences those who profit from
| the status quo.
| simondotau wrote:
| While this is likely common knowledge in this community, Mumble
| uses the Opus codec, which is a significant factor[1] in Mumble
| audio being both high quality and very low latency.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CELT
| botverse wrote:
| Stadia uses Opus as well
| LinAGKar wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it used to use Speex
| nemetroid wrote:
| According to a 2019 pull request[1]:
|
| > 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.
|
| 1: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/pull/3812
| delusional wrote:
| Isn't that Ventrilo?
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Mumble did use Speex too. I4ve heard the "This is an
| example of Speex" voice line spinning around my head too
| many times every time I set up mumble.
| abhiminator wrote:
| I believe Discord also uses Opus codec IIRC. But wonderful to
| see the codec in a _fully_ open-source project.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://krisp.ai/
| theelous3 wrote:
| Except via discord, the quality is throttled and a bunch of
| random decisions are made about what to do with your audio
| outside of the codec.
|
| 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 2EUR a month
| box can handle a decent sized party with no issues.
| Macha wrote:
| The issue is that Discord's audio processing is focused on
| mitigating the impact of the worst audio setups, not
| preserving the quality of the best, and I don't even think
| that's the wrong focus given their casual target market
| theelous3 wrote:
| I'd believe this if they didn't offer higher quality as a
| paid feature.
|
| 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.
| jhgg wrote:
| A pass-through mode where we disable all audio processing
| is on the roadmap, for those with really good setups that
| don't need the post-processing :)
| [deleted]
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Hosting a Mumble server is the easy part
|
| 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
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I have long left the online gaming community but this was
| no issue 10 years ago. We all switched between TeamSpeak
| 2, 3, ventrillo and mumble seemlessly.
| slim wrote:
| What you did was not optimal. You had the opportunity to
| switch to a better platform and a strong incentive to do
| so (one member could not participate without it) you
| should have put the necessary effort to transition. It
| would have made your community stronger. Generally
| speaking, the policy of "none left behind" the most
| powerful bond-building tool available.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| This is not the case if setting up and using Mumble would
| have caused net more friction for the rest of the
| community. See all the comments about needing to perform
| constant troubleshooting for mumble users.
| supertrope wrote:
| You can't force peers to install software and take the
| time to train themselves on the new software like you can
| with an employee.
| j1elo wrote:
| It also doesn't help that Mumble has a very bad UI for
| the average user.
|
| 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.
| andai wrote:
| Does it still badger you about certificate generation on
| first launch?
|
| 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.
| j1elo wrote:
| Yes it does. Or it did circa 2019 when I last logged in
| for the first time.
|
| 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...
| navjack27 wrote:
| Yup. I've done this too. https://youtu.be/eUQKOPyiANc
|
| It's just so bad in discord I don't know what they are
| doing
| smcameron wrote:
| > But wonderful to see the codec in a fully open-source
| project.
|
| 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/
| gsich wrote:
| Mumble has RNNoise.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| Most calls on the web are using it. It's the webrtc default
| tialaramex wrote:
| Right. As you would desire and hopefully expect, even if it
| might be technically possible to squeeze out slightly better
| compression with some non-free technology, it's _very_
| attractive for everybody to agree on the free things instead.
|
| 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.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| I used to work on 3D language learning apps in VR. The voice
| audio chat was always a problem until I started using Opus.
| Combine Opus with 3D audio, and it sounds very lifelike and
| clear, almost as if you are in the same room as the other
| person!
| keb_ wrote:
| Mumble is great. I've personally used it with friends for about
| ten years now. The main client, while not as intuitive as
| Discord, is pretty easy to use and get used to. Many of my
| friends are non-technical and never had problems using Mumble
| aside from the occasional microphone issue (which happens to me
| regardless of VoIP software.)
| SCUSKU wrote:
| I used this back in 2014-2015 in high school to chat with friends
| while playing Minecraft. I had a good experience with it then,
| can't speak for it now though.
| romseb wrote:
| I was looking for an alternative to Google Meet for a constantly
| open meeting room where we can share ideas and screens and spend
| the lunch break. Ideally, this would've been Slack with discord-
| like voice channels where you can drop in and out and see if a
| participant is online. They promised this feature [1] last year,
| but it did not land.
|
| What we tried and their pros and cons:
|
| 1. Google Meet:
|
| * * Excellent noise suppression only if you are on one of their
| higher paid plans like Enterprise or Business Plus
|
| * + Statistics on participant activity (how often did they enable
| their mic/camera, bitrate, etc.)
|
| * - Overheating on MacBooks
|
| * - Room will be deleted if nobody is joined for X days
|
| * - Real full screen for screen sharing not possible
|
| * - Proprietary, needs a paid plan
|
| * - Forget about privacy
|
| 2.Zoom:
|
| * - Proprietary, no privacy, security vulnerabilities
|
| 3. Teamviewer:
|
| * - Needs a separate software (otherwise a worthy competitor to
| Google Meet)
|
| 4. Mumble:
|
| * - Others in this thread have already laid out why it is not
| being used more: UX, setup wizard, no echo suppression, finicky
| push-to-talk
|
| 5. Discord:
|
| * - No privacy
|
| * - No encryption
|
| * - Focused on gaming
|
| * + Interesting feature for screen sharing: You can select if you
| want readability and low frame rate or high frame rate and low
| readability
|
| * + Voice channels
|
| 6. We now ended up with a self-hosted k8s instance of Jitsi Meet
| (they host their own at [2]) which works great:
|
| * + Open source
|
| * + Latency and call quality is phenomenal
|
| * + sharing screens of multiple participants works like a charm.
| Sharing a screen in Google Meet takes 5 seconds or so, in Jitsi
| Meet, it is immediately.
|
| * * Echo suppression is not as good as Google Meet's
|
| * + Unique features like synchronized Youtube player (which
| automatically mutes all participants)
|
| * + End-to-end encryption
|
| * + Recordings
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/7/21505519/slack-
| instagram-...
|
| [2] https://meet.jit.si/
| unpopularopp wrote:
| Focused on gaming is a negative? lol I mean finding a "niche"
| and doing there very well is a road to sucess
| omk wrote:
| What is the minimum spec required for running Jitsi for upto 5
| participants?
| lu4p wrote:
| I think the mumble/ teamspeak ship has sailed a long time ago the
| UI/ UX of discord is just better.
|
| I would like a open source solution similar to discord, I think
| the closest thing we currently have are Signal group calls.
|
| Current features of Signal calls: - peer to peer no need for a
| central server which sells your data (Discord) or needs to be
| setup rented, maintained (teamspeak, mumble)
|
| - end to end encryption
|
| - video calls
|
| - Screen sharing
|
| - large group sizes for text chats (1000)
|
| Wanted features: - adjust the volume of individual participants
|
| - multiple voice/ text "channels" for a group (something similar
| to discord servers)
|
| - usernames so that not everybody needs to know my phone number
|
| - more participants in a single group call (currently maximum 8),
| I think 10-15 should be enough for most use cases, with more
| voice participants voice chat breaks down regardless, because of
| people constantly interrupting each other
|
| - the UI for group calls is still a little confusing
| gizmo385 wrote:
| > no need for a central server which sells your data (Discord)
|
| Discord doesn't sell your information:
| https://discord.com/privacy
|
| FTA:
|
| > "The Company is not in the business of selling your
| information"
| n4bz0r wrote:
| I doubt Mumble/Team Speak are ever going to be as popular as they
| were before. But boy do I wish they would.
|
| - Native UI: everything happens instantly
|
| - Lightweight client
|
| - The ability to host your own server
|
| Even initial setup difficulties had an upside. More often than
| not, those who weren't capable of properly setting things up also
| weren't the right fit to play seriously/competitively. Such
| little barriers were a great initial filter for toxic wannabes
| with short attention span.
| superkuh wrote:
| It's too bad Teamspeak stopped existing as the excellence it
| was in the Teamspeak 2/3 era. By the end of TS3 they had
| already implemented nagware that would kill TS3 servers every
| $x months unless you reinstalled $latest. And now with
| Teamspeak 5 it's just Matrix. And Matrix is a _super_ heavy
| protocol. You can 't just spin up a matrix server on some
| random low end VPS with 512 MB of ram.
| justaj wrote:
| > And Matrix is a super heavy protocol. You can't just spin
| up a matrix server on some random low end VPS with 512 MB of
| ram.
|
| That's not the fault of the "heavy" protocol, but the
| implementation of it. As of now there's only 1 reference
| server implementation which is written in Python (Synapse),
| but https://conduit.rs/ and Dendrite are making good progress
| to be able to run on embedded devices.
| [deleted]
| beshrkayali wrote:
| FWIW Linux Unplugged[1](one of the best linux discussion podcast)
| still uses mumble[2] to connect and communicate with their
| community.
|
| 1: https://linuxunplugged.com/
|
| 2: https://linuxunplugged.com/mumble
| huseyingiram wrote:
| Hesabima giris yapamiyorum Duo uygulamasindan erisim alamiyorum
| cunku telefonum sifirlandi iPhone oldugu icin Instagram
| Instagram'a giris yapmak istiyorum erisim istiyorum geregini Arz
| ederim
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Is there something like Mumble, but for _async_ voice
| communication? Of the style of yac.com, or of the style of
| "voice recordings" you see in WhatsApp or Telegram? I think that
| would be really nice for 1:1 and group chats in a work/friend
| context, especially spanning timezones, and where the point isn't
| to game or socialize in real-time, but instead around busy
| work/life schedules.
| alfg wrote:
| I've always been a fan of Mumble (and murmur server) and its high
| quality, open source software.
|
| I made https://guildbit.com years ago for gamers that want to
| just quickly spin up a free temporary server with their friends.
| I still operate it today since there's still a few users out
| there. I realize most are using Discord now.
|
| I still think it would be great if someone were to create an open
| source Discord clone using Mumble/murmur as a backend. I'm sure
| it's possible, but not too sure if there's still a sizable
| audience willing to use Mumble over Discord these days.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| Running Mumble server for my coworkers and instantly switching
| between channels is very effective. Where in Teams people are
| occupied to one meeting we can quickly help each other. Also
| created many one-on-one channels so you can talk privately if
| needed. It's free, very fast and low latency, scales to hundreds
| of clients on single server instance has text-to-speech
| notifications and multiple clients on Windows, Linux, Android and
| so on. The server can be very secure and private, if you combine
| Wireguard with Mumble and only bind to the WG0 interface it's
| encrypted twice. No centralized eavesdropping like is possible
| with Zoom, Teams. The attack on private conversations is real,
| see the freenode saga or Skype being bought by the mother of all
| telemetry etc.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| For clarity, you can switch audio/video meetings in Teams. When
| you switch to another one the current one is just put on
| 'hold', and it's a one button click to re-join.
|
| Not that I'm advocating Teams here, far from it, I think of all
| the remote-meeting platforms it's one of the worst, but it's
| MS, so regardless how bad it is, it'll maintain it's
| significant market penetration.
| fastball wrote:
| Not just maintain, probably grow market share significantly
| now that they're adding it as a built-in app in Windows 11.
| summm wrote:
| but it always takes some seconds to actually switch to the
| other Teams meeting. On mumble this is instantaneous.
| 0x0 wrote:
| Security seems to have taken a backseat, by the looks of the
| attitude towards outdated openssl versions displayed here.
| https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/4001
| SirCypher wrote:
| This is only the case for the static binaries and not for the
| official Ubuntu/Debian/... releases.
|
| At least they put a warning on their release page:
| https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/releases
|
| But releasing a vulnerable version of Mumble is still bad. They
| should either fix it or not release a static binary at all.
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| Nothing in that thread backs up what you are saying. There's
| some rude commentary by an angry individual but the devs
| clearly explain the reasoning and make it known to end-users on
| the actual download page.
|
| Also just update your version if you are really so concerned?
| This doesn't affect me at all on linux and the current
| development snapshot for windows is using an updated openssl
| lib.
| SirCypher wrote:
| It does not affect you, but it affected me. I wanted to run
| the newest version of the Mumble server "murmur". Easiest way
| to do this is to use the static binary. (At that time there
| was no warning on the release page yet.) But of course this
| ran with an outdated OpenSSL.
|
| I don't want to run a server with unpatched known security
| holes so I had to scrap that idea.
|
| "Just update your version" is also not possible because the
| newest static build still contains old OpenSSL.
|
| In the end I had to get the newest murmur package from Debian
| Unstable. It's fine, it works for me (TM), but then why did
| the static build exist at all?
|
| They should just remove the outdated static binary build if
| they aren't going to fix it.
| ArsenArsen wrote:
| They also support RNNoise, and everyone who knows me knows I love
| RNNoise! :)
| fingerguns wrote:
| Mumble has been one of the if not the best additions to FiveM[1]
|
| It has allowed for so many cool in game features, like the
| ability to have DSP audio filters on channels so we can do
| RadioFX audio effects in game without any external applications.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/citizenfx/fivem/tree/b959f174803a972cf8c7...
| elkos wrote:
| I use mumble with the plumble client when I'm taking the train or
| just walking at the park when we have voice only meetings at
| work. It is a very power and bandwidth efficient solution.
| Pxtl wrote:
| The audio quality is great and the latency is marvelous but I
| can't get normies to use it with the tedious setup wizard, poor
| feedback cancelling from that one person who joins with the
| laptop speakers and mic, and the labyrinthine security model.
| rijoja wrote:
| How does the latency compare to other solutions?
| allarm wrote:
| The biggest contributor to latency in any VoIP solution is
| the underlying network latency. Even though Mumble uses
| modern low-latency codecs such as Opus, it is difficult to
| compete with Zoom/Webex/others because Zoom and Webex are not
| only clients, but also the backbone network. If you want to
| use Mumble (or any other similar service) in an international
| firm, you'll need to invest in a low-latency network with
| proper QoS to deliver an experience similar to Zoom/Webex. I
| guess it would be cheaper to just use Zoom/Webex in this case
| - we spent millions each year for our 10-20 Mbps MPLS network
| at one of my prior jobs (not including the cost of the
| engineers). However, it might work for a smaller company.
| patentatt wrote:
| But everyone generally accesses Zoom/Webex/et al over the
| public internet, right? Do they implement a CDN-like series
| of endpoints and have some special sauce low latency
| network in between nodes? Genuinely curious.
| rightbyte wrote:
| With P2P sound there is no need for expensive slow servers
| serving free tier users. Scalable! But companies have a
| hard time letting go of control and 'value add'.
| kevincox wrote:
| For some markets P2P is not acceptable. For example in
| "gaming" markets people will DoS any IP they see so
| hiding your IP behind a relay service like Discord is
| essential.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Sure but it should not be a problem for friends or teams.
|
| I use Steam voice chat to talk to my brother and I find
| it by far the best one. Low latency and no filter BS. I
| don't think it is P2P though.
|
| I and my friends used Ventrilo earlier and the level of
| QoS you get from hosting on a low load computer with like
| 4ms ping to each node is insane compared to modern
| alternatives ...
|
| For a two way call Ventrilo is essentially P2P.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| It's low, like 100-200ms.
|
| I used mumble for a few years to bridge a VHF radio between
| an airport and a remote site via the internet. The tricky bit
| was getting the push-to-talk on the radio to work, which
| required some circuitry and some source code tweaks...
| pierrefermat1 wrote:
| Yes would love to see some concrete numbers vs the typical
| solutions
| pindab0ter wrote:
| In all the years I've used it I never noticed any latency. In
| fact, I didn't even know that could be a 'thing'.
|
| I haven't used it in the past year, but if I were to guess
| I'd say it's in the tens of milliseconds, definitely not
| higher.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| I used it (on Android the app was called Plumble) over tor,
| because of tor latency there were lag spikes at times, but
| in general, it worked quite well.
| Fnoord wrote:
| The sound quality, low latency, self-hosting, FOSS, and
| customization are each plus points compared to the
| predecessor, Ventrilo. However, something like self-hosting
| isn't what everyone wants. Some just want to rent a server
| without having maintenance. I believe that, plus the
| interface, is why Discord is so popular. That, plus the
| network effect. Which Ventrilo once had. And Altavista, for
| that matter.
| southerntofu wrote:
| There's dozens of hosts providing Mumble servers. People
| want Discord because of (in this order): network effect,
| access from the browser, polished UI.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Agreed, and because people like free as in beer (while
| not knowing the repercussions of paying with privacy).
| [deleted]
| merb wrote:
| discord has a higher latency and sometimes when you start a
| new discussion you overlap sometimes, which is akward. but
| discord has one of the best noise cancellation, which makes
| it the favorable solution for me.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I tried to switch a community I once hosted to mumble.
| Previously teamspeak 2 was used which showed its age through
| high latency and low quality. TS3 was not available yet. There
| were so many complaints about the client that people voted to
| switch back to ts2. When ts3 came along they switched to that,
| but I already passed on the admin job by then so don't know any
| details about how it went. While it's not open source you can
| at least self host...
| j1elo wrote:
| I have to agree that the security model is horrendous. It's
| that kind of thing that when you come up with it and program it
| in your own code, it looks so obvious and easy to use right?
|
| Well... no. The way one configures users and permissions in
| Mumble clearly didn't pass the mom test.
|
| I have similar qualms with how users identify. "What? are you
| telling me that there are these weird files that are called
| <certificates> and that if I want to move between my PC,
| laptop, or phone, I need to hunt for this file and copy it into
| all my devices?" (obviously at this point people started
| logging in as "Joe2", "Joe3", etc. in my server)
| [deleted]
| PBnFlash wrote:
| Seriously, I ran a community while discord was taking off and I
| had an infographic for how to install and connect but still
| spent hours every week walking people through troubleshooting.
| I tried to make a custom build preloaded with the server even.
|
| I understand that connecting to hundreds of servers wasn't a
| thing in 2015 but it is just so high friction to talk to people
| about video games.
| tsjq wrote:
| thanks for that heads-up !
| Causality1 wrote:
| Oh yeah. I love Mumble as long as it's been set up by someone
| else. Trying to get a server running on your PC with correct
| security settings and then over a phone walk non-technical
| people through connecting to it? Nightmare, or at least it was
| a few years ago when I tried.
| daptaq wrote:
| I've managed to convince my friends to use Mumble just as the
| pandemic started. The initial suggestion was to use Discord,
| but I luckly averted that. I think that the wizard and the
| defaults in general can be improved, but it is not unmanagable.
| The only thing that can confuse people is the certificate
| security system, where a friend of mine complained they
| couldn't connect, but it was just a "Do you want to accept this
| certificate" popup that was in the way. That is an issue of
| general technical illiteracy, that Mumble cannot address.
| ctas wrote:
| > The initial suggestion was to use Discord, but I luckly
| averted that.
|
| Why is Discord not a good choice in your opinion?
| lapnitnelav wrote:
| On top of what has already been said, I found Mumble to be
| a better voice com tool than Discord, sound quality is
| better, shortcut mapping more extensive, etc ...
|
| Discord having the slack-like features, video streaming and
| social networking integrated in a nice UI makes it a better
| all purpose consummer product unfortunately.
| southerntofu wrote:
| It's a centralized, non-free service that feeds on people's
| data. That's horrible enough, but i'm guessing i can't even
| use it with a Tor browser? Mumble works plenty fine on the
| Tor network.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| > can't even use it with a Tor browser?
|
| You can, but it will be painful with captcha and email
| submit links for your new IPs.
| southerntofu wrote:
| I haven't used Discord previously so i wouldn't know, but
| i read they use WebRTC. If so, then it wouldn't work with
| Tor Browser at all, which is built without WebRTC support
| for privacy reason.
|
| Please let me know if that's not the case.
| sneak wrote:
| They log all of the text chat, including DMs, so there are
| some major privacy implications.
| toxik wrote:
| If not for anything else, then because Discord is a service
| owned by somebody, Mumble isn't. The free and open web
| depends on people using the Mumble model.
| vifon wrote:
| For starters it's not free (as in freedom).
| summm wrote:
| I have some AdBlock and Anti-Tracker stuff configured. For
| each single login, discord makes me solve 2 captchas, enter
| my password twice and click on an emailed link. Fuck them.
|
| On mumble however, I start the client and it just works.
| Also, it instantly reconnects should the connection break.
| ctas wrote:
| I've made a similar experience with Discords login flow.
| It's definitely broken. Fair enough.
| allyourhorses wrote:
| This gave me a giggle, perfect sentiment IMHO. Discord is
| basically saying "fuck you" at least 4 times each time
| you login, and the only appropriate response absolutely
| should be "no, fuck you"
| yusi-san wrote:
| Do you open it on Firefox with an ad blocker etc? If yes
| it may come from reCaptcha and not from Discord itself (I
| had the same issues on websites that use reCaptcha).
| However, if you use the discord app you may not need to
| solve a captcha.
| gkbrk wrote:
| > It may come from reCaptcha and not from Discord itself
|
| Unless Google is employing hackers to secretly integrate
| reCaptcha into other apps, it is coming from Discord no
| matter who creates the captchas
| milankragujevic wrote:
| It asks me the same even without adblock or tracker-
| blocker, because my IP address changes often. An annoying
| nightmare really when you "need" something from a Discord
| chat quickly. I stopped using it, insist on people
| emailing me or chatting on Telegram.
| [deleted]
| tialaramex wrote:
| > The only thing that can confuse people is the certificate
| security system, where a friend of mine complained they
| couldn't connect, but it was just a "Do you want to accept
| this certificate" popup that was in the way.
|
| Is this because the server didn't have a certificate from a
| trusted CA? In which case the fix is that Mumble could
| integrate ACME to get certificates from Let's Encrypt or
| whoever
|
| Or is the situation that Mumble doesn't integrate the WebPKI
| and so it expects the user to make trust decisions for each
| certificate, which is pretty hostile ?
|
| > That is an issue of general technical illiteracy
|
| I guess that's kind of true, but I'm not sure I should need
| to understand the correct range of manifold pressure for the
| engine in a motor vehicle to operate it, for example. "Just
| do what is obviously the correct thing" seems reasonable in
| both cases.
| etskinner wrote:
| > Is this because the server didn't have a certificate from
| a trusted CA? In which case the fix is that Mumble could
| integrate ACME to get certificates from Let's Encrypt or
| whoever
|
| In my experience, a lot of people who set up a Mumble
| instance don't have an actual domain name, so they can't
| get a CA certificate, only self-signed. Most people do set
| up at least a dynamic DNS of some sort. But as long as
| you're doing that, you might as well pay the extra $10/year
| to get a domain, in my opinion.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Most people do set up at least a dynamic DNS of some
| sort.
|
| Most dynamic DNS providers got a default shared domain
| name added to the Public Suffice List e.g. dyndns.example
| might be on the PSL and then you can have your server be
| named etskinner.dyndns.example when you call their
| dynamic DNS service.
|
| In this case Let's Encrypt is quite happy to give you a
| certificate for etskinner.dyndns.example since you
| control it. Unlike a web server, the Mumble server can't
| trivially bake the elements needed for this into its
| functionality, but it shouldn't have a hard time in the
| two easy cases:
|
| 1. There is no web server for this DNS name, spin up a
| temporary web server, answer Let's Encrypt queries until
| they give you a certificate, then spin it back down
|
| 2. This machine is the web server, so, have the user tell
| us how to pass http-01 challenges on that existing web
| server.
|
| That doesn't cover every corner case, and it is one more
| notch on your "Duplicate certificate count" rate limit if
| you do have an HTTPS web site on the same name from Let's
| Encrypt, but I'd guess 95% of users who have a working
| Murmur and either a Dynamic DNS setup or their own
| "proper" DNS setup would get a working system and a
| further fraction would have some trivial problem they'd
| fix and after that it would Just Work(tm).
| zxzax wrote:
| It's not a bad idea, but that essentially means running a
| dynamic DNS service (or partnering with one) which is
| outside the scope of mumble.
| huseyingiram wrote:
| Instagram Hesabima giris yapamiyorum erisim istiyorum
| kullandi adim huseyingiram e-posta adresim
| useyin65@outlook.com
| [deleted]
| unicornporn wrote:
| The feedback cancelling the was the major gripe last time I ran
| a server. Otherwise very functional software.
| idlewan wrote:
| A feedback cancelling solution would probably increase
| latency however, so it would kill the 'low latency' claim if
| it was on by default. Definitely something needed to be
| switched on for problematic setups though, since the
| disadvantages would be outweighed greatly (not having
| feedback \ echo is a necessary feature).
| toxik wrote:
| It shouldn't necessarily, you can find out how much of the
| speaker output ends up in the microphone input and
| compensate. I'm sure the models are more complicated to
| deal with echoes and distortion but the same approach
| should basically work: fit the filter offline, apply it
| online.
| theelous3 wrote:
| The major gripe here should be with the monkey who was using
| speakers in voice comms.
|
| People with a speakers setup sound awful on all software.
| Some kind of headphones or earbuds cost less than 10 quid.
|
| The feedback cancelling wasn't the problem. It's a feature
| that should scarcely even exist.
|
| The only time it's ever really good is when there is some
| sort of interactive one to many setup. A hands on demo from a
| lecturer where for some reason they can't wear some wireless
| buds.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| You _can_ make speakers and mic sound good, but you need
| solid software support and also a really decent mic. I have
| a friend who does this with a Blue Yeti mic sometimes. If
| you put it in cardioid mode, have the speakers not too
| loud, and position the mic so the speakers are behind it,
| you can 't hear feedback on Discord. But people running mic
| setups this fancy are definitely the minority.
| theelous3 wrote:
| Sure, but the vast majority of this legwork is being done
| by a nice mic having directional capability and massive
| gain control. This is far from a win for discord and
| audio comp software. This kind of setup can be made to
| work on mumble too.
| eximius wrote:
| I miss Mumble. My friends all migrated to Discord, which replaced
| Mumble + phpBB.
| hyperionplays wrote:
| Intergrating Mumble with Mattermost would be amazing. Then I'd be
| able to convince people to switch.
| matkaguessing wrote:
| Mind blowing post you have shared for us. I specially
| congratulate you for this kind of post. https://bit.ly/39eiTXA
| andrewzah wrote:
| Great software, poor UX. I have difficulty getting people to use
| it over zoom or discord.
| rijoja wrote:
| Since this is a client server architecture wouldn't there be
| alternative clients?
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Poor UX seems to be a recurring theme with open source
| projects. Anyone knows why?
| kzrdude wrote:
| mumble seems to be power user software. The setup wizard
| expects one to setup microphone levels, I didn't even have
| the mic connected. And I have different setups connected at
| home and at work, which makes me doubt the agility of this
| configuration (can it adapt to plugging in and removing
| equipment?)
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Many reasons:
|
| * Code is more interesting to the author than user experience
|
| * High familiarity with a tool, as authors gain by working on
| a tool, will normalize bad UX
|
| * Free software (specifically) often attracts a type of
| person that has very non-mainstream UX tastes
| bombcar wrote:
| And by the time anyone's developing for the project,
| they're already entirely familiar with all the quirks and
| UI decisions.
|
| It takes real top-down leadership (or a one-man project) to
| be able to change those things.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| ...and yet sometimes even that is not enough.
|
| A recent story I have been fascinated by involves the
| Android reader RedditSync - not OSS, but championed by a
| fearless Solo Dev. He released V20 after so long and so
| much feature feedback from dedicated users in the Play
| Store beta channel. Immediate community revolt from V19
| users who just liked the UI the way it was and never new
| there was a beta program in the first place. Much
| subreddit infighting. Rollback. Cooling off period. Now
| its basically forked with X users on a 'beta'V20 and Y
| users on the Play Store V19. [1]
|
| Honestly my heart goes out to the dev who solid knocks
| out feature requests and just didn't expect the level of
| cling his old UI had developed. Some people were proper
| angry and he was in a tough spot.
|
| Anyhow its probably better material for a business school
| case study but point here is even a one man project can
| get caught by UI pattern bias.
|
| [1] https://redd.it/mtgmqn
| hytdstd wrote:
| I think of it like this: open source software is typically
| written by volunteers. Volunteers with good systems skills
| but no UX skills can author open source software on their
| own. Oppositely, volunteers with no systems skills, only UX
| skills cannot.
|
| This is probably worsened by the fact that people who care
| about good UX will gravitate towards software with good UX,
| which is often commercial.
| toastal wrote:
| Just guessing: There's not a lot of designers in open-source
| circles. They tend to get paid a lot less than devs and so
| many don't get the privilege to care as much about FOSS.
|
| When I went to design school and tried to use Inkscape I was
| laughed at. The day-1 was basically here's a Mac, here's
| Adobe, now learn to play in this sandbox (which I did til
| post college). FOSS tends to love Linux and BSDs support, yet
| most popular design tools aren't available there.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > They tend to get paid a lot less than devs and so many
| don't get the privilege to care as much about FOSS.
|
| I do not follow this line of reasoning. There are Indian
| FOSS developers being paid 10 times less compared to their
| SV peers. Why would your salary matter? Surely, what's
| important is the amount of dispensable time you have, not
| your salary.
| toastal wrote:
| Say you don't have a lot of cash and you want
| microblogging and VoIP. Do you spend money to host your
| own Mastodon and Mumble servers, or use one where many
| admins (understandably) require payment or donations to
| cover costs, or do you use the free-because-you're-the-
| product Twitter and Discord? Do you use GMail or pay for
| Posteo/ProtonMail/Fastmail/etc.? Do you use the
| centralizing, closed-source GitHub or pay for SourceHut
| or host your own Gitea server? Can you afford to build a
| rack at home to self-host and invest in the skill to
| maintain and secure it? Do you invest time in learning
| GIMP despite lower-quality, community tutorials because
| it's free (as in beer and freedom) or do you follow the
| crowd and use Creative Suite or Affinity Studio because
| it's the tool most your _jobs_ will expect you to use?
|
| I think it is (unfortunately) a privilege of being able
| to afford the FOSS and privacy-focused alternatives--
| through money and time. A good salary gives you room for
| privilege. I don't think you can separate finances from
| the equation. Many people are just out there trying to
| take the easiest route to survive, and FOSS isn't as
| easy.
|
| (Heck, even speaking English is a privilege many here on
| HN have. Many FOSS projects are only in English. I've
| been in Thailand for a while now and while the much of
| the youth demographics resents its government, almost no
| one knows about decentralized, private, FOSS services
| because it hasn't been localized and people can't afford
| the bill either--and as such the government has many
| times censored Facebook and YouTube and other centralized
| systems.)
| Qwertious wrote:
| >I think it is (unfortunately) a privilege of being able
| to afford the FOSS and privacy-focused alternatives--
| through money and time. A good salary gives you room for
| privilege. I don't think you can separate finances from
| the equation. Many people are just out there trying to
| take the easiest route to survive, and FOSS isn't as
| easy.
|
| Reminds me of a quote from
| http://theantisense.com/2018/10/26/biohacking-trash-
| flavored...
|
| "I understand that "teaching a man to fish" is a thing,
| but that metaphor breaks down under the constraints of
| time and the pressures modern civilization. The ability
| to make tools stems from access to time. The freedom of
| time comes from having money. There's a reason all those
| Renaissance dudes knew 7 languages, had spare time to
| write poetry, write essays on philosophy, and built their
| own laboratories. It's because someone was doing their
| dishes and laundry for them. Someone else was subsidizing
| the overhead."
|
| (The article make a rather different point and that quote
| is _slightly_ cherrypicked, btw. It 's a good article, I
| recommend it.)
| squill wrote:
| I would like to be involved, but I'm not really sure how.
| The open source culture and tooling is strictly all about
| code. At least, that's the way it feels to me. Very
| unapproachable. And often times, there is zero signal that
| they would even be interested in getting the help. From my
| experience.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm a design lead and make six
| figures. I don't think that has much to do with anything.
| andrewzah wrote:
| In general most OSS projects don't have the resources to
| spend on UX development -and- developing the core
| functionality. I don't think most projects would be
| against UX contributions. You could just create an issue
| for a project to discuss it, or bring it up wherever
| their community is.
| j1elo wrote:
| I believe this happens because writing high quality UIs which
| is consistent, is well studied (as in having studied how
| users react to it in order to improve the worst parts), and
| is available for multiple platforms, is a HUGE amount of work
| that would only go forward if people got paid to do it.
|
| So I'd wager that lots of OSS have bad UI because no
| commercial entity considered that the market is big enough to
| justify spending resources on it. This is, an external
| company pouring money at hiring OSS devs to work on the UI,
| or maybe even the project creators themselves founding a one-
| person business to sell services or products that require
| such a good UI.
|
| An example: if Mumble had a huge user base, maybe there would
| possibly be some company selling high-quality, easy to use
| desktop applications for it. But reaching that goal is very
| hard, and most OSS projects never get even a fraction of the
| traction that would be needed for such commercial efforts.
| utunga wrote:
| It's an important question that deserves a considered
| response.
|
| IMHO its more than just lack of designers (though that's
| important) it's actually a balance of power thing.
|
| Delivering really good UX requires taking a design-led
| approach to the whole project. Unfortunately this conflicts
| with one of the main reasons coders enjoy working on open
| source. No management, no customers and you get to work on
| what you want. Design it for yourself, not others.
|
| But of course, the interface that the average coder wants is
| nothing like the interface that the average user needs -
| especially if the average coder is intimately familiar with
| all the features. Most coders appreciate this and try to
| design a 'friendly' interface but at the end of the day it's
| a power imbalance. In a conflict between clean design or
| adding more features, a team led by programmers is going to
| prioritize features.
| foxpurple wrote:
| The GUI was built in the era of windows XP and Skype. And you
| have to host your own server.
|
| Nothing can compete with discord where you just press a
| button to create a "server" and send out a link. It all just
| works and it costs a fortune to run.
|
| No one has enough free time to build a brand new high quality
| app for mumble which works on 3 desktop OSs and 2 mobile.
| mjevans wrote:
| You nailed it: THIS is most of the general GUI problem.
|
| """No one has enough free time to build a brand new high
| quality app for mumble which works on 3 desktop OSs and 2
| mobile."""
|
| It also can't be (whatever windowing kit, E.G. QT) because
| that requires a big download in addition to the program,
| and also 'doesn't feel native' or 'doesn't look right' or
| 'sets off the AV scanner'.
|
| The other escape hatch is electron; which looks "web", but
| is even _more_ bloated, but at least it doesn't set off the
| scanners. Instead it just gobbles CPU cycles, memory, and
| is slow and horrid.
|
| I'm to the point that I don't care what wins, or how horrid
| writing for it is; I just need a widgets toolkit and
| bindings that can be developed for ONCE, is hosted with the
| OS and shared among all apps, and works on Mobile (all of
| them), Win, OSX, and 'nix.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's the first time I hear of "sets off the AV scanner"
| being a major problem for native apps. How frequent is
| it?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| If you don't get the proper certificates for signing your
| packages, all the time.
| mavhc wrote:
| Electron is what Discord and Teams and Slack use. And
| Google's stuff just uses web pages.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >The other escape hatch is electron; which looks "web",
| but is even _more_ bloated, but at least it doesn't set
| off the scanners. Instead it just gobbles CPU cycles,
| memory, and is slow and horrid.
|
| I keep wondering if something like Godot could win out in
| GUI-land. https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-
| engine-great-for-ad...
| [deleted]
| viraptor wrote:
| Apart from all issues mentioned so far (all valid (edit:
| utunga got there while I was still writing)), there's also a
| problem where you can't apply good UX in small patches here
| and there. You can fix some terrible experience where it's
| actually a problem, but to really improve UX in an app, you
| need to touch almost everything at the same time, which means
| a lot of time spent on the task and required commitment to
| the idea from the leaders.
|
| That's really hard to organise in opensource world. And when
| you try to introduce leadership which can do it and try to
| collect information, you get the issues Audacity ran into.
| Sure, Tentacrul can lead the UX effort and will make Audacity
| much better, but the community impact was pretty negative.
|
| The only opensource project I really remember pulling off a
| well organised UX update is Blender. And even that was after
| years of people screaming "don't touch right-click-to-select,
| we're used to it and newbies need to learn".
| pdkl95 wrote:
| A good solution to this is the traditional[1][2] UNIX
| approach of separating mechanism and UI. First develop the
| core functionality _without_ a UI as a library (or daemon
| or whatever). The actual UI is then developed as a front-
| end to the library. This allows _multiple_ front-ends to
| coexist so a new UI can be developed without disturbing the
| people that like the old version.
|
| Too many projects tightly couple their UI and mechanism,
| which always leads to problems.
|
| [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.ht
| ml#id...
|
| [2]
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch04s04.html
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Interesting way to develop a program while keeping ui
| seperated, would have never thought of that approach. But
| in my experience, developing the UI alongside also leads
| to insights into your product you hadn't foreseen.
| pdkl95 wrote:
| Sure! Developing both the backend and an initial UI front
| end in parallel is a good idea. The point is to separate
| different aspects of the program into manageable, modular
| sections. Separating the mechanism and UI is just an
| another way to practice information hiding and modular
| programming.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I agree with your first point but I disagree that telemetry
| is required to improve UX. You can "collect information" in
| a respectful way by _asking_ users instead of stalking them
| (and letting a malicious third-party such as Google
| Analytics do so as well).
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| What happened with the Audacity community when Tantacrul
| started?
|
| edit: found the thing where people got upset about
| telemetry -
| https://github.com/audacity/audacity/discussions/889
| viraptor wrote:
| The telemetry was one thing, but there was also a few
| people with "what do you mean muse owns this project now?
| I'm forking rather than accepting forced leaders".
| southerntofu wrote:
| Because not every free-software project has UX designers
| working on them? I mean the UI is the frosting on the cake,
| that you can do in pretty much any language and usually with
| less knowledge of the backend infrastructure... but not a lot
| of people are doing this job.
|
| Kudos to the Tor Project and Conversations.im for making
| decentralized, encrypted communications within everyone's
| reach.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> Poor UX with open source projects. Anyone knows why?
|
| Quoting from a commenting on this thread:
|
| _" The only thing that can confuse people is the certificate
| security system... ..That is an issue of general technical
| illiteracy, that Mumble cannot address."_
|
| I think this sums it up. While not universal, OSS has a
| higher tendency to not-my-problem certain things. Often this
| is UX, other things too.
|
| OTOH, OSS tends to delight at taking ownership of many other
| types of problems. Interoperability, multiple
| implementations, advanced features, user choice, etc. Stuff
| that proprietary software tends to be bad at.
|
| The thing that drives facebook or Tinder to make their
| software addictive is the same thing that drives them to make
| it usable for the average person.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Here is how it goes:
|
| - you slap together a low effort UI in order to test your
| code.
|
| - You use this UI so much during development that it becomes
| "intuitive" for you.
|
| - Early adopters are interested in functionality, so they can
| overlook a poor UI for a while.
|
| - They use this poor UI so much that it becomes "intuitive"
| for them.
|
| - Early adopters even help newcomers to overcome the poor UI.
|
| - Meanwhile you develop more features and postpone the "less
| valuable" UI improvement.
|
| - At some point there is so much functionality hooked to the
| UI that it would be a drag to change it. Also as it was
| quick-and-dirty stuff it would also be very difficult for
| others to redo the UI.
|
| - You find a way out: pretend that it is vital to extract the
| library hidden in your program, so that "anyone will be able
| to put the UI they want on top of it so leave me alone".
|
| - This further postpone the new UI, because potential UI
| makers have to wait until the library is done, and then users
| have to wait until the UI designer and implementer does their
| thing.
|
| - It takes too long because portability issues and API design
| is not so easy, so you lose your UI designers one by one. So
| you have to make a low-effort UI to test and demo your
| library.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Zoom? There is video now?
| andrewzah wrote:
| Well, those are just what my friends and peers generally use.
| I frequently use zoom with cameras turned off.
| daptaq wrote:
| The great thing is that mumble is a free client with an open
| protocol, dofferent clients can coexist. To my knowledge this
| warrents a ban on Discord.
| andrewzah wrote:
| This is all great when people make that a priority. But most
| people I know don't really care about the openness of a
| platform so long as it works nicely.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Whereby used to be excellent: No login no plugin.
|
| I'd happily give them the $4 a month per employee they were
| requesting at the beginning for WebRTC, but they keep jacking
| up their prices, currently at $12, increasing by $2 every 6
| months...
|
| ...and now they present login as if it is mandatory, even if we
| pay for it on our side, which is annoying for
| customers/applicants.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Quite popular in the EVE: Online community, where alliances and
| corps run mumble servers with tens of hundreds of people each.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| I play eve, most are on discord now.
|
| Only a few "hardcore" corps are still running mumble
| remram wrote:
| > tens of hundreds
|
| Thousands?
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| It was quite popular back when I played WoW.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Mumble sucks.
|
| Security problems.
|
| Barely maintained.
|
| Some pretty major os bugs.
|
| Most people can't get it to work first try.
|
| I have to say, my game group uses it instead of guided or discord
| and it is genuinely annoying.
| 22c wrote:
| >Security problems.
|
| What security problems?
| nix23 wrote:
| >Some pretty major os bugs.
|
| It think you "Barely" know what Mumble is.
|
| >Most people can't get it to work first try.
|
| Yeah sounds like a nice group of yours ;)
| rijoja wrote:
| If you prefer closed source solutions geared towards non-
| technical people maybe HN isn't the forum for you.
| tpush wrote:
| Nonsense, this message board has nothing to do with open
| source software per se.
| haunter wrote:
| Why? I have an open source project and we run it on Discord
| with 500 people on the server because it's just better than
| anything else available. Yes I wish there were an open source
| alternative but there isn't really when you don't want to
| self host or manage servers like with TS or Mumble (and those
| are utterly lack any contribution or chat features). Just
| voice chat alone doesn't cut it and Mumble not even that good
| as some people make it out to be
|
| Element is the closest but the fact that it's paid already a
| huge turn off for a lot of users https://element.io/
| rijoja wrote:
| If you run an open source project yourself, maybe you could
| sympathise with the contributors and formulate your
| criticism in a more constructive manner.
| undfg wrote:
| This attitude of "you got it for free so you can't
| complain" is a scourge on open source. How can something
| ever improve if we can't point out the flaws in it?
| zxzax wrote:
| >is a scourge on open source
|
| I wouldn't say so, unstructured complaining really
| doesn't help at all. If the project has been around for a
| while then the flaws are usually well known. Before you
| lodge a complaint, you'll want to check the bug tracker
| to see if something has already been discussed. If it
| has, then the flaws have already been pointed out, and
| further complaining upon that point does nothing and only
| serves to annoy the people working on a fix -- the best
| thing to do there is to start contributing and
| collaborating on a fix to the issue. Then once you do
| that, you'll see why it's not helpful when people keep
| bothering you with "is it fixed yet" type comments :)
| approxim8ion wrote:
| If you don't want to self-host then Element is not paid
| either.
| mouldysammich wrote:
| Element isnt paid? It has paid hosted options if you want
| your own synapse server, but the free version has always
| been there and if you're using discord why care that you
| dont have your own domain for your matrix community
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| It's entirely possible to criticize closed source software
| without suggesting someone leave the community.
|
| I think it might be a little uncharitable to say they prefer
| closed source software, it might be because it's often the
| easiest to access/use for a lot of people. I mean, that's
| been the struggle, no?
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| That's pretty elitist and for no reason. Just because you use
| niche software doesn't make you special
| franga2000 wrote:
| Hammers suck. Easily stolen if left unprotected. Basically
| haven't changed since invetion. Sometimes they break. Most
| people actually want a screwdriver.
|
| Mumble is a tool with its own strengths and weaknesses. It's
| not a social communication platform, so of course it sucks to
| run a community on it!
|
| What it is is an excellent voice server. I've used it for
| intercom at a large live event and it was perfect. I've seen it
| used at a large LAN gaming event to successfully cut bandwidth
| usage almost in half. It also has broad support for positional
| audio in games - something that Discord notably completely
| lacks.
|
| It's free, it's open, it's not bound to provider-operated
| servers, it has stellar latency and is very extendable. Please,
| find me another option.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| All good, but it has no users while everyone has Discord and
| since Discord works from a website you don't even need to
| install a client.
|
| Simple convenience is the killer feature. Niches will use
| niche software
| nix23 wrote:
| >but it has no users while everyone has Discord
|
| Why do you know that?
| knownjorbist wrote:
| Tell me you don't play video games without telling me you
| don't play video games.
|
| Everyone is on Discord.
| ArsenArsen wrote:
| TeamSpeak has cemented Mumbles paradigm in the minds of
| many, many mainstream people years before Discord existed.
| Mumble works pretty much the same in terms of convenience
| and simplicity. It's not that niche. Try it before you
| knock it.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >Try it before you knock it.
|
| This is the kind of stupid elitism people have here. As
| if I haven't hosted Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, and Mumble
| servers for years. Maybe these days there isn't
| competition (although you mentioned TeamSpeak), but even
| back in the day it was a tiny miracle if two different
| groups actually shared a platform even inside the same
| game different groups/clans/guilds usually had different
| setups and I had to juggle multiple clients just to
| participate compared to now when everyone is simply on
| Discord.
|
| Unless you need some niche feature (like the OP's
| positional audio) there simply is no reason to go for out
| dated client/server model.
| franga2000 wrote:
| That's just the point - it doesn't need to have everyone on
| it because it's not a social platform, it's a voice server.
| I'd never use Mumble to message someone out of nowhere,
| share memes or have a meeting. All my gaming groups are on
| Discord, which is where we hang out and plan events. But
| when we actually go play, we often switch to Mumble or
| TeamSpeak (depending on the game).
|
| Convenience isn't a killer feature for us - it's the
| _actual features_. Positional audio simply isn 't available
| on Discord and depending on what you're playing, might only
| be available via Mumble and nothing else.
|
| It's a tool like and other with its own use-cases. It will
| never be the one and only communication platform and that's
| a good thing!
| bartwe wrote:
| Mumble is fun, we have a positional audio plugin for mumble in
| our game.
| southerntofu wrote:
| I'd like to point out that Mumble is one of those rare solutions
| that works just fine on the Tor network, for everyone's privacy.
| Why would it be normal for a voice server to know where you
| reside in order to take part in a discussion?
|
| In the age of everything WebRTC that only works with JavaScript
| and countless invasive browser "standards", Mumble is very
| refreshing. (Yes you can technically tunnel WebRTC through Tor by
| using firefox/chromium instead of Tor Browser, but by doing so
| you will leak your IP!)
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Mumble is one of those rare solutions that works just fine
| on the Tor network"_
|
| How do you even set it up to use TOR?
|
| It'd be nice if it just had a "Connect through TOR" checkbox in
| its preferences, but I have a feeling it's not even remotely so
| easy, is it?
| southerntofu wrote:
| It's not so easy no, but it's not so hard either. You need to
| use a SOCKS5 proxy with localhost:9050 (where tor usually
| runs). Then you need to connect using TCP not UDP.
|
| I believe it's as straightforward as that, but to be honest i
| haven't fired up a network log to check that Mumble wasn't
| sending IP addresses or other "private" information over
| there.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" where tor usually runs"_
|
| So you have to set up tor too.
|
| The average person's not going to know (or even want to
| know) how to do that.
|
| It needs to be made as simple as a "connect over tor"
| button, and everything should be done for you, including
| setting up tor... anything requiring more interaction or
| knowledge is going to lose a lot of users.
| hjek wrote:
| I think you could also just run `torify mumble` on the
| commandline.
|
| Edit: Ok, that doesn't work. You're right, there should
| be a Tor button in Mumble.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Not that i disagree with your point, but that's not
| exactly part of tor's threat model that it would be setup
| by a random application trying to leverage it. Usually,
| you set it up once on your system then apps access it.
|
| Auto-setup may be easier if you're targeting a certain
| platforms, for example on Android you can keep a local
| copy of the F-Droid PGP key, download the latest
| installer, set it up, and from there enable Guardian
| Project repository and setup Orbot (tor for Android). On
| Debian, you could just run "apt install tor" (acquiring
| privileges on the go) from your program and then start
| proxying through localhost:9050. But if you're targeting
| many systems the problem becomes hairier.
|
| If you have better suggestions about how to ease this
| process, i'm sure folks from the Tor community will be
| very interested! :)
| baohwang wrote:
| How is this different from a VoIP WebRTC implementation?
| hytdstd wrote:
| For one, it's native rather than web.
| vetrom wrote:
| Native vs yet another Electron app, customizable in pretty much
| every fashion, and it has inbuilt support for positional audio
| chat (so you can manually move entities in relation to each
| other, or use one of many available plugins to feed positional
| data from something else!)
|
| see: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Games
| j1elo wrote:
| I think Mumble as an OSS voice chat project has had its success
| and has brought some net positives to the ecosystem since its
| inception. But nowadays, especially since pandemic times, the
| focus of the technology has moved and newer systems are in place
| which bring very powerful possibilities to the audio/video
| conference field.
|
| WebRTC has seen an incredible push and if you only wanted Mumble
| for its open-sourceness and its use of the Opus codec for low
| latency, you might be better off by joining a Jitsi room with
| your friends and enjoying the immense effort that the web browser
| already brings in matter of echo cancellation and other
| shenanigans related to conferencing apps, plus the better UI that
| these kind of projects offer for end users (Mumble's bad UI is a
| common topic).
|
| On the other hand there is Discord, but it plays in a different
| league because it is closed-source, VC-backed, and uses some
| advanced technology like AI-based noise cancelling.
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