I thought I’d address this issue on my blog – and encourage folks to comment on it – because our company website isn’t really the place to do it. A lot of people ask me “what’s so great about Mumble? Why should I use it instead of a competing product?”
Here are the few reasons I could come up with off-hand:
- The Overlay. This is a huge feature in my opinion, and it’s all set to get better. Basically you can have either an opaque or transparent overlay over most any game (as long as hackshield/gameguard/punkbuster doesn’t mess with Mumble’s ability to inject the overlay code) so you can still see what’s going on in a full-screen game.It’s set to get better too… open up a Steam game, and press shift+tab. Rumor has it, that’s the direction Mumble’s overlay is headed in.
- The Translations. This is pretty much a non-issue for people like me who only really speak English, but for non-english speakers, it’s a godsend. Instead of half-arsed automated translations that say shit like “Oh, Dios mío, el Minka Aire!” when they really mean “Enable Push-to-Talk”, Mumble has a dedicated group of volunteer translators, most of whom are very skilled in their own language and instead of taking the source text and translating it out-of-context, will translate it based off their own usage of Mumble and knowing what the function does.
- The Quality. Not only does Mumble sound awesome (full disclosure: TS3 rivals it at times because they share the CELT codec), but it’s well written code as well. The bulk of the software is written using publicly available libraries like QT4 and Google Proto Buffers which means that much of the code has already been audited and vetted by thousands of other developers and any bugs show up quite quickly.
We have a disclaimer on our Mumble servers webpage about how Murmur is constantly under development and “Bad Things” can happen because we were expecting Murmur to crash every so often. We typically track the git HEAD at each release and we build on a not-terribly-well-supported OS (FreeBSD) so naturally we were expecting to have a few bombs here and there.
So far though, we’ve had exactly one (knock on wood) Murmur crash, and the cron script brought it straight back up. Our UK server was unsatisfactory, but that was the host’s fault not Murmurs.
- It’s Growing and Evolving. Mumble hasn’t really stagnated at all in it’s history – it’s constantly evolving and there’s always something new to look forward to. It doesn’t sit with the same release for two years because there’s been no security bugs.
Overall, if you’re a voice-chat user and you haven’t given it a shot (or worse, you used it in the 1.1 days and wrote it off), I genuinely urge you to give it a shot. 