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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Speaking of Krisp, I’m curious about other people’s experiences using their noise suppression with Discord.
I personally had it enabled (by accident) for over a week, and during that week I noticed people were either ignoring me or not hearing me. I discovered it was the latter when I disabled the noise suppression option. Krisp was suppressing my voice in addition to noise.
Other people I know who’ve tried it have had similar results, so I’m wondering if we’re using it wrong or if Krisp just isn’t worth using at this point.
I've ran into the same problems. My voice gets consistently muted with it on. I've been able to get it to sort of work by manually setting input sensitivity but even then I still get muted at times.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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™.
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.
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"
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.
Has anyone found a good solution for paying for captcha solutions in your browser? I'm getting tired of solving captchas, and would pay a decent amount of money to be able to click one button and have it just solve it for me.
Can take a bit of time, but needs to be non-clunky.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
There's dozens of hosts providing Mumble servers. People want Discord because of (in this order): network effect, access from the browser, polished UI.
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.
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'.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with your sentiment. For FOSS to be successful, it needs to focus on UX, and beyond that, on what users expect from a product. It can perform better, be more secure, be absolutely more ethical etc but masses don't choose software like this, it's a means to an end at most.
On the other hand, IRC could easily be just used as an IM backend to a hypothetical FOSS discord alternative. You would press CTRL+V in the client, it would upload your clipboard image to the server, return you an URL, and that would be pasted into the chat box, which would then embed the image. GitHub's editor does this for example and it's a smooth experience, and perfectly compatible with a text-only protocol.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
You are quite literally the first person I've seen say the UI in Discord is confusing. For everything Discord gets wrong, I would never put the UI on that list.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use Discord to stay in touch with a group of friends who use potatoes as PCs and the worst version of cable internet (cox). The voice quality is always flawless, even though in games we often run into game connectivity issues, the voice comes through loud and clear.
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.
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.
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."
As someone who runs a discord community closing in on 7k I can tell you that discord is far easier to manage. More features, built in statistics, good role setups, plenty of bots and a easy API. The open source alternatives are light-years behind unfortunately.
Can you give an example of something especially good in comparison? Examples of things especially bad in comparison include essentially everything I can think of that attempts to address the same niche.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!)
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.
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.
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! :)
- 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
>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.
"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.)
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
TS5 is matrix? I’ve been using the TS5 beta client for over a year and I’ve been able to connect to my old TS3 server with no problems, both audio and text. I wasn’t aware there was a new TS5 server either, I thought they were going to keep the current one.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
We ran a mumble server for a 3,500 user, paid/paying, video game server community (Battlefield 3, circa 2010). We typically had 200+ users on, with 30-50 users per channel (three servers, two channels per server) plus a handful of regulars in the hangout channel. People would stream the same video on netflix and chat with eachother. It was quite the community.
The server ran on a "free-tier" server that the hosting company gave us for free, since we were renting three of their top-tier gaming servers. It used, at peak, 5-7% cpu, and 250mb memory, if I remember correctly. Normally it was closer to 2% cpu and 100mb memory. This was with all the settings jacked up to "ultra" or the equivalent.
Audio quality, and latency were amazing. It's really disappointing to use video chat like Google Meet, or Zoom after a product like Mumble.
My servers & mumble server finally got retired, but some of the regulars started their own server, and occasionally I'll login still and a bunch of them are still hanging out. Mumble is an incredible, extremely stable product. Highly recommend.
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.
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.)
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)
Been trying to try something for lower latency chat, because I feel like a large part of the video meeting annoyance is talking over each other because of latency.
We've been really excited about the Google Meet noise cancellation, but I guess our work account either doesn't qualify or hasn't had that rolled out yet. Our gSuite account is really old, from back when they were free, so maybe it doesn't qualify. Meet works well in general though, we use it for our lunch chats.
In the past have used Jitsi, had some good and some bad experiences with it, but mostly it works well.
I just tried qTox with my wife, and had her also on the cell phone, and qTox was at least as good as the phone for latency. She was on wifi on Windows, and I was hardwired networking on Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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/
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
On discord, communities (or as they call it servers) will typically have many different channels. From my understanding you'd need your own domain to replicate that on element. Eg. #memes:ultimatefrisbee.pt
If you run an open source project yourself, maybe you could sympathise with the contributors and formulate your criticism in a more constructive manner.
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?
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 :)
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?
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