Get better quality voice chat with other online gamers using Mumble

Mumble is an audio chat program designed to be used when playing online games. It enables you to listen to and chat with several other people at the same time without making the game much slower.

Installing Mumble is straightforward and by default just installs the client software. The server software can be installed if you want but must be selected.

The sound quality is pretty good, especially when you consider that it is handling audio from several people.

On the first run it starts the audio tuning wizard where you can choose which audio devices to use with Mumble for recording and playback. Part of this wizard involves setting the latency for the best possible performance. It's an easy way to set something that can be tricky to get right.

It has Voice Activity Detection this can be with a button used for push to talk, raw amplitude from input or signal to noise ratio. This has a live test mode with a slider so it is easy to set up. Finally there is a quality setting depending on your internet connection.

A rather clever feature is that Mumble can make speech sound like it is coming from the direction of the other player in supported games. It is quite effective, even on headphones, and does a good job of ahead and behind. Click here for a list of games Mumble supports.

Authentication on servers is done with certificates and Mumble can use certificates automatically so there is probably no point disabling this option.

It can show a list of other users overlayed over the game along with a frames per second counter. The latter is useful for checking the impact on performance. The lips icon next to a users name turns from grey to red when they are speaking.