I’ve written a couple blog posts referring to teamspeak 3 (ts3) by now. In both of those articles, I mentioned that it was a pain in the ass to manage permissions. Yeah well, I forgot to mention another problem it has: crashing for no reason.
I’d be lucky if my ts3 server runs for longer than a day. Even then, maintaining it and giving people permissions to do simple things like write messages in the server and send a poke to another player was a nightmare. I had to consider other options…
First, try to understand the difference between the way the ts3 server ran, and how other servers run. The ts3 server was little more than a script they give you to use. There is no official ubuntu or debian installer for ts3; you have to download it, extract it, then run their start script. You might also want to add a crontab entry for it, so if your machine ever reboots, it’ll start back up again. What they also should have included was an event listener that checks when the damn thing crashes so you can write a restart script around it.
Any other server (e.g. apache, mysql, subsonic, etc.) runs as what’s known as a “service”. These are obtained as a prepackaged .deb file that gets installed for your system, or they’re something you can obtain via a sudo apt-get install <packageName> command. These are automatically embedded in the startup steps your server makes, so you don’t have to make a special entry for it in your crontab file. TS3 ultimately was a hacky solution to begin with.
I googled around, checking the differences between teamspeak and ventrilo(vent). In my research, I kept stumbling across this other voip client called mumble. I kept seeing many speedtests with mumble, ultimately resulting in mumble having the lowest latency and fastest response. I was impressed, especially since I never really cared for ventrilo. Nobody’s voice chat ever seemed to sound very good through that program.
From there, I began looking more into mumble, and began grinning at what I was finding out about it. Many posts, however, expressed difficulty with setting it up. I thought to myself “nothing could be worse than the ts3 server’s setup!” Here’s my rundown of why mumble kicks ass:
First of all – It’s open source. That’s right, and when stuff’s open source, usually that means it’s made by users for users. It’s been around for a while, so I know they’ve been continually fixing it and making it better so it’ll work and work well. Generally, I’ve found open source applications seem to function better than their super big company proprietary counterparts.
Second – It already exists in debian’s repository. Installing it is as simple as sudo apt-get install mumble-server. You’re done. No special keys, no telnetting, no anything.
Third – It doesn’t crash. Ever. I started it almost a month ago, and it’s still going strong.
Fourth – It’s free. Granted, so are ventrilo and teamspeak, but… well… keep reading.
Fifth – Great apps. The iphone and android apps are also free, and they work. Personally, I think the iphone app is a bit more well put together, since the one on android seems a bit buggy to me. Shouldn’t be too hard to fix, and it doesn’t impede you from using it or anything… but I don’t like the fact that I have to click exit on the program, then re-enter it in order to see my settings change.
Sixth – Easy permission management. Holy shit it’s easy now. This person has access, but this other person won’t. (Explicit permissions based on user). Set user into Group A. Also create Group B. Group B is a child of Group A, therefore Group B’s users inherit all permissions set in Group A, unless stated otherwise”. I know that last sentence seemed hard to understand, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to understand than ts3’s ridiculous idea behind permissions.
Seventh – Comes with in-game overlay integration right out of the box. It’s as though the people behind mumble already know what gamers prefer in a voice chat program, and have gone to the trouble of putting it in there. Nice feature.
Eighth – Yes, it is the most responsive. There is little to no delay at all.
I could go on, but why bother. Everyone, ditch ts3, and accept the mumble change.
Download Mumble Here oh wait it’s not 2013 anymore, go use Discord. Duh.
Update: I wrote this article in 2013, and all of this was true then. If you’re just now stumbling upon this article now, you probably think I’ve lost my mind. Mumble over Discord? Discord didn’t exist in 2013 when I wrote this article… heh.