In four months of using Mumble, I've never had my eardrums blown out once, and anyone who's sounded quiet has been quiet because of a bad mic or mic-on-head syndrome. The server does it for you and does it right. How do you turn someone up or down? You don't. 'OK, say something now,' the Vent adjusters say, followed by some tweaking and another, 'OK, say something again.' Even if you follow the obscure and complex settings for Vent normalization, you still end up needing to turn people up and down because it's not perfect. Twenty-four people adjusting their settings to level out one single person, does that seem right to you? How many times have you been in Vent when someone new pops in - or someone with a new microphone - and they destroy your eardrums? What happens then? Either everyone forces that person to change his advanced volume settings or they immediately open up their advanced settings and turn that person down. The latency is so low on Mumble that it allows for normal conversation, and 'Meteor in five seconds' means 'Meteor in five seconds.' Low latency is the main reason I will never go back to Ventrilo and is my biggest annoyance when I am forced to go back to a Vent server. There is just about as much lag as you'd have on a normal phone call or a mobile call with good reception. 'Meteor in five seconds' should mean 'Meteor in five seconds,' not 'Meteor in three seconds by the time you hear this.' Mumble was specifically created for low latency, and it lives up to its promise. I even went so far as to set my Deadly Boss Mods bars to shift from small to large at 7 seconds simply because I wanted to take into account a split-second human lag plus a half to full second of Vent lag. Mumble allows slightly finer adjustment on positioning as well as changing the font size, but I would say that both are close here.Īs a raid leader, I'm acutely aware of voice chat latency. Both offer customization options allowing for moving the position, changing the font and the color, and showing only who is currently talking. Overlay is a native feature of both Mumble and Ventrilo it allows you to see everyone who is in channel or just who is actively speaking. I'll run through features, but don't be surprised if you come out of this with a new perspective on voice chat options and a strong desire to switch to Mumble. I started this article with every intention of making a pros-and-cons comparison between the two programs, but in truth, I had a hard time coming up with pros for Ventrilo. Mumble is perhaps better known in FPS circles, where the low latency really gives it a competitive advantage. It's mostly unknown in WoW, as Ventrilo clearly dominates voice chat in our world.

Big Crits uses Mumble, a low latency VOIP program for gaming. One of the most common questions I get from the show Big Crits is 'what's the mod that shows who's talking in Vent?' It's actually not a mod, and in fact it's not even Ventrilo. After five years of using Ventrilo, I say it's time to change to something better. LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libmumble.so.1.'What's your Vent info?' is as ubiquitous as 'What's your GearScore?' Voice chat programs are a fact of WoW life, and by all means Ventrilo dominates the market. Using this preload command should only be necessary if you did not install a binary package (and thus do not have mumble-overlay available):Īs described in our README to use the Overlay in an application you preload it.

Current releases of Mumble also support black-/whitelisting from the client itself (Settings->Overlay, make sure advanced is checked).Īs described in our linux README to use the Overlay in an application you start hat appliaction through the mumble-overlay binary: This will tell Mumble that you do not want the overlay in this particular game. If you would like to disable the overlay for a certain game (because you do not want it in that particular game, or that game has issues with the overlay), and do not want to disable the overlay altogether, put a file named nooverlay (without any extensions) in the same folder as the game executable is located. Disabling the overlay for a particular game

Mumble overlay wow