TeamSpeak 3 vs. Mumble

TeamSpeak 3

At the Red Army, we’d been using TeamSpeak 2 as our communications software of choice for some years. In fact, aside from sitting in the same room as one another, I can’t really remember ever seriously using anything else. For whatever reason, we’d made our decision over using Ventrilo and there wasn’t really anything else which came into question. When Skype first became popular, a few of us moved over to making Skype-to-Skype calls and occasionally attempting to hold conference calls, but whilst the quality was a big improvement, the galloping bandwidth usage and the difficulty of using it in conjunction with gaming soon drove us back onto our TeamSpeak server.

Over winter, however, we decided it was finally time to move forwards. Someone suggested we give Mumble a try, an open source, low latency and high quality piece of software, specifically designed with gaming in mind. Personally I’d been using it with a Day of Defeat: Source clan, and could easily tell the difference and note the advantages over our trusted TeamSpeak. The latter had essentially given up producing updates, and their website continually advertised their all-new TeamSpeak 3 version to be ‘coming soon.’ Curiously enough, however, TS3 was released as an open beta almost as soon as we installed and tested out our own Mumble server for the first time. Here’s a quick summary of our tribulations with them both, and why we finally chose TeamSpeak 3 as our successor.

TeamSpeak 3

Strange that this should appear just as we were ready to abandon it as vapourware, TeamSpeak 3 certainly appeared as something of a surprise. If we’d actually been paying attention, the open beta for TS3 was announced back in October, 2009, but since the last update for TS2 had been way back in 2007 (and that only a security update, as far as I know) it’s no surprise we hadn’t been following the news.

My first experiences with this release were fairly frustrating: for whatever reason, the beta version of TeamSpeak 3 that I was running insisted on pumping all of my audio back out through the line-in, making my presence on the server more annoying than usual. No loopback cables were plugged in, no Stereo Mix or What U Hear devices, nor was the microphone at fault. Since the effects were limited to TS3 I can only assume it was some strange bug in the software, but I haven’t been able to confirm whether or not it’s been fixed or not.

As a result, most of my gaming over the last few months has been via Mumble, however from what I experienced and what I’ve been told second hand, is that TeamSpeak 3 is an excellent successor. In terms of latency, it easily outstrips the earlier version, something made clear if you sit in a TS2 and TS3 server simultaneously and listen to someone speaking. Whether Mumble or TS3 has better latency was impossible for me to tell, that is to say if there is a difference, it is so fractional as to be lost on my ears. Despite the reduced latency, the quality of the audio has not suffered in any way, and is in fact a good step ahead of TS2. Personally, I found the quality of TS3 to be slightly crisper and clearer than Mumble, though this may be in large part due to the reduced number of knobs, dials and whistles on the configuration page. This latter point is a major plus in TS3′s favour: where Mumble offers a setup panel that really in little way explains what the user should be doing, TS3′s setup wizard is somewhat clearer, quicker and produces a decent result without much in the way of tinkering. This could partly be a result of so many years using the forerunner TS2, and being used to their methods, but even our more impartial clan members had similar things to say.

In addition to the usual suspects of having rooms, administrators and varying codecs, TS3 also offers some extra features that may or may not prove useful in the future. There’s a facility for uploading small files directly to the server and having them accessible to all clients, which could certainly prove handy when you just need to pass something on quickly. There’s also the option of positioning the voices of the other TS3 clients in chat, such that you can make it sound like player A is ony our left and B on your right. Probably quite useless, but plenty of fun to play with I’m sure! Now you can finally sit that person with the annoyingly crap quality microphone over in the corner where he belongs.

In conclusion, this is where my vote lies, presuming they have fixed the bug that affected my PC and I can actually use the thing. Mumble puts itself forward as a light client with no frills, but that seems to my eyes to be totally negated by the complicated set-up procedure. Tied on latency, and maybe edging it on quality, TS3 has the advantage of the extra features and easier configuration.

Mumble

Since I originally had problems with the TS3 installation, I’ve used Mumble a fair bit over the last few months with a couple of clans, and overall impressions are good. The lower latency is definitely a major improvement over TS2, which is again clear to see if you join both servers simultaneously (or get spied playing TF2!). The gaming overlay function, which produces a list of players in the channel over the game you’re currently playing, and highlights who is talking, is also a pretty nice feature which has been very useful on occasion, especially when you don’t know everyone you’re talking with.

In terms of quality, the software certainly outdoes TS2 and is probably as good as TS3, or it could be if it was set up correctly. Unfortunately, this is no easy task. Although the software guides the user through the set up procedure, on more than one occasion I’ve heard people confused about what exactly you’re meant to do, and indeed which way you should be sliding the bar in order to get the best quality. The result is unfortunately much less reliability when it comes to overall quality, and you invariably need to tweek your settings afterwards. Sadly, the simple menu for doing so pretty much hides all of the useful options, whilst the advanced menu bombards you with some many sliders and tickboxes, and it’s difficult to know where to start when touching up your sound settings, even in comparison to TS2.

Interestingly, as far as I understand it and in contrast to the TS3 model, the server does not set the quality and therefore the bandwidth requirements, rather each individual user has his/her own settings. This has already proven useful; where certain users have logged on using slower Internet connections, we’ve moved into a lower quality channel on our TS2/3 server specifically with that in mind, but with Mumble this isn’t necessary. This does, of course, have some disadvantages. Since users can essentially set their own quality standards, it means that the overall impression you get from the software isn’t as good as when you join a high quality channel in TS3, which may account for some of my observations here. The software also seems to attempt to moderate its quality level according to recent trends, which can result in some very odd behaviour: one clan member was using a fairly flaky Internet connection, which would temporarily timeout, yet where he would simply disappear from the conversation in TS3, his voice ended up being transmitted in some kind of robotic bursts in Mumble. Similarly, once sat in a channel on my own for a while, Mumble had set itself onto an exceedingly sensitive setting (perhaps thinking I was talking and it couldn’t hear me) which meant that when someone did eventually join the channel, everything I said was überloud, and my microphone picked up the mice scratching in the attic.

Aside from those issues, I haven’t really much experimented with the channels and so forth, though it is handy being able to write to clients more easily (and have messages read out by Stephen Hawking’s sister). I was actually considering if it would be possible to read out questions for one of our #redarmy-clan quizzes, simultaneously sitting in several channels at once, though haven’t really looked into it properly yet!

In conclusion, Mumble is certainly a no nonsense client when it comes to extra features, however the complicated set-up scores a major point against the program. One definite advantage over TS3 is the client’s ability to set his own codec requirements as opposed to being dictated by the server channel, which is great news for low bandwidth users, but perhaps not such a great boon given today’s typical Internet connections. If we take latency and quality to be on a par with TS3 (or slightly worse), there just doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to using Mumble.