Many multiplayer games offer text chat that gets in the way of gameplay by changing a playerโs focus from playing the game to typing messages. Mumble is a powerful open-source client-server VoIP application that solves this problem. It’s available for all major platforms like Windows, Linux, and macOS.
While it can be used for any kind of activity, it is primarily intended for gaming. It’s optimized for low-latency communications, making it perfect for intense game situations where every second counts. With Mumble, you can voice chat with your teammates, or anyone else, allowing you to stay focused on the game.
What’s New in Mumble 1.4 Voice Chat App
As there are many changes with this new version, here are the most prominent.
New Plugin Framework
Mumble supports loading plugins that provide extra functionality if enabled. Users can choose which plugins to install and which to enable at which point in time.
With Mumble 1.4 a new, general purpose plugin framework has been introduced. With this framework, the range of possibilities offered to plugin developers has been vastly increased. If youโre interested to find out more about this new plugin framework, check out the plugin documentation.
Ability to Search for Users
f you have ever been on a large Mumble server, you know that it can be a bit hard to find a specific user or channel. In order to improve on this situation, Mumble 1.4 ships with a fully featured search dialog that can be opened either via the menu bar or via the shortcut Ctrl+F.
With this dialog, you can easily search for users or channels. On to of that you can even specify whether your search string is to be interpreted as a regular expression.
Stereo Playback
With version 1.4 Mumble can playback stereo audio streams. This means that it is now possible to send a stereo stream to a Mumble client and it will actually be played back without being mixed down to a mono stream.
Keep in mind that this feature is currently restricted to playback. The official Mumble client will still continue sending audio as mono.
Find Out Whoโs Talk
The new TalkingUI feature can be considered the equivalent of the already existing overlay but for “non-gamers” or in other terms for everyday usage. This feature adds an optional floating window, containing a list of currently speaking users and their respective channels. This allows you to quickly see whoโs currently talking and in which channel that person currently is in.
Other Improvements
Apart from those mentioned above, some additional changes also deserve to be noted here.
- Channel listeners: This new feature allows a user to โlisten toโ a channel. In that case, all audio that is heard by people in this particular channel is also heard by the listening user.
- UI indication for access restrictions: In previous versions of Mumble there was no indication of whether you are able to join a channel or not. The newly added UI lock indication solves this problem by marking โaccess-restrictedโ channels with a lock icon.
- Nickname changer: For those of you who are annoyed by people using excessively long or complicated names or people changing their nicknames frequently, Mumble 1.4 introduces the possibility to set a nickname for users.
For a complete list of all changes introduced in Mumble 1.4, you can refer to the projectโs website or visit the release announcement.
