Am i the only one interested in mumble....

[Aradreth]

The first sort of works okay under PA's OSS emulation. The second can be easily sorted out by making OpenAL think it's talking to OSS or ALSA depending on what else the title's doing.

I tried PA's OSS emulation today and it's not really a viable solution as I got a lot of popping/crackling noise with it. Hopefully it'll improve and become a viable solution soon enough.

If ALSA is so cumbersome to work directly with, why not use some sort of HAL (SDL making use of OpenAL or PA directly)?

Now, I know OpenAL itself is undergoing heavy development as well, especially with its new Sampling Implementation (or whatever its called), which is more efficient and what not. IIRC one of the ultimate goals of PA is to serve as a sort of HAL for sound devices so developers code for it instead of the underlying "bare metal" API (OSS/ALSA) and ensure compatibility, however to achieve this, PA has to first become the defacto standard Sound backend for Linux (as X is for graphics, yes I know I must seem like a scratched record by now), to really work this way.

PA is slowly becoming the defacto standard because with both Fedora and Ubuntu using it PA has a fair percentage of the Linux user base. So given some more time I think more distro's will follow suit and start using it.

[M1AU]

Mumble is indeed a great alternative to TS and Ventrilo and since the latest release (1.4) they also reworked the PTT (push to talk) progress to work without xevie. (afaik xevie is bugged in Hardy for some reason).

I'm also running my own Murmur Server for quite some time now.

[Thetargos]

If ALSA is so cumbersome to work directly with, why not use some sort of HAL (SDL making use of OpenAL or PA directly)?

Now, I know OpenAL itself is undergoing heavy development as well, especially with its new Sampling Implementation (or whatever its called), which is more efficient and what not. IIRC one of the ultimate goals of PA is to serve as a sort of HAL for sound devices so developers code for it instead of the underlying "bare metal" API (OSS/ALSA) and ensure compatibility, however to achieve this, PA has to first become the defacto standard Sound backend for Linux (as X is for graphics, yes I know I must seem like a scratched record by now), to really work this way.

[Aradreth]

The first sort of works okay under PA's OSS emulation. The second can be easily sorted out by making OpenAL think it's talking to OSS or ALSA depending on what else the title's doing.

Ah I didn't know about PA's OSS emulation thanks for pointing that one out I'll give it a go at some point. OpenaAl on the other hand I've battled with trying to get it to use SDL which can use PA but OpenAl just throws up errors (it is compiled with SDL support).

[Svartalf]

Pulseaudio is still under heavy development and I'm sure they will bring the input up to standard as soon as they can. With games I'm more annoyed about the fact many still use OSS and refuse to start unless they can grab the sound output. That and openal's lack of pulseaudio support.

The first sort of works okay under PA's OSS emulation. The second can be easily sorted out by making OpenAL think it's talking to OSS or ALSA depending on what else the title's doing.

[Aradreth]

My only concern about Mumble is the current state of affairs with Pulse Audio and software mixing, especially input. This a critical feature to have in PA before it could be really useful. As it is right now, and being most sound chips on the market single stream DSPs, PA is a very welcome feature by offering its software mixing capability plus many other features (merging together more than two sound cards, and per-application volume settings, etc). Its capture support still is flaky (and I have not been able to get it working on any computer running with it). Without software mixing using VoIP apps is difficult or even useless, especially if you have to choose whether the game or the VoIP app will have sound... yes I'm looking at you TeamSpeak! (and what is the point of having a VoIP app, if you don't actually hear your friends?). I'm sure that being Mumble native ALSA it is susceptible to work with dmix, however I have not tried it. Very few things work with dmix (in my experience) even if they have native ALSA support.

Pulseaudio is still under heavy development and I'm sure they will bring the input up to standard as soon as they can. With games I'm more annoyed about the fact many still use OSS and refuse to start unless they can grab the sound output. That and openal's lack of pulseaudio support.

[Thetargos]

My only concern about Mumble is the current state of affairs with Pulse Audio and software mixing, especially input. This a critical feature to have in PA before it could be really useful. As it is right now, and being most sound chips on the market single stream DSPs, PA is a very welcome feature by offering its software mixing capability plus many other features (merging together more than two sound cards, and per-application volume settings, etc). Its capture support still is flaky (and I have not been able to get it working on any computer running with it). Without software mixing using VoIP apps is difficult or even useless, especially if you have to choose whether the game or the VoIP app will have sound... yes I'm looking at you TeamSpeak! (and what is the point of having a VoIP app, if you don't actually hear your friends?). I'm sure that being Mumble native ALSA it is susceptible to work with dmix, however I have not tried it. Very few things work with dmix (in my experience) even if they have native ALSA support.

[hmmm]

resurrecting this thread with an interesting post courtesy of icculus, i.e. VoIP support for ioquake3... http://lists.ioquake.org/pipermail/i...ay/002722.html

[xav1r]

Good to know about a free software alternative to teamspeak.

[Thetargos]

It is indeed refreshing to see this. Last time I checked out Mumble it was fairly early on, and upon the failure to put out a Linux client compatible with ALSA (for TeamSpeak) or a Linux client at all (speaking about Ventrilo), the Linux gaming community does deserve to have an up-to-date VoIP program for our gaming fix. Personally TS has worked really well for me, but being it only OSS and ts lack of ALSA (and dmix) support has caused that only people with hardware mixing sound chips can use it effectively. Now with PA things will be much different, as it matures (PA still doesn't play very nice with capture). It's been a while since I last checked out Muble, I must confess (about a year ago?) but from the sound of it, it has been making real strides. Will have to check it out soon.

Thanks for the heads up.