pro's and cons to to voice comms

[Songwhistle]

Hi all,

 

Lately I've heard a lot about voice comms favoring one over the other. This culminated in a raid member leaving after being asked to join teamspeak.

 

So lets just sum up some of the options out there and have a look at reasoning's behind using the different ones.

 

In old days many were used to using ventrillo due to lack of better options, because lets face it - teamspeak 2 sucked in terms of pure audio quality. However today with teamspeak 3 we have soooo many more options. Don't get me wrong i still like ventrilo for one simple purpose - voice and voice only.

 

So what does ventrilo have that others do not. well ventrilo has ghosting meaning you can listen in on channel you are currently not inside. This can have value for interrupt groups rotating interrupts on bosses and still being able to listen in on main channel while not interrupting tanks and so forth.

 

Since the arrival of teamspeak 3 you have gotten a lot more options that others do not have.

Best skinning options out there if you feel like being patriotic about your guild. You can now skin your teamspeak using QSS which is very similar to CSS.

Changeable audio codecs with bandwidth limiting - simply AMAZING for optimizing sound.

File Transfer - really good for sharing files to your raid or guild.

Certificate security - teamspeak can now be setup so once a user is registered with the server that pc will always be recognized and no passwords are needed. - this does not mean you have to set it up this way - it is just an awesome option that no others have.

Teamspeak mobile device apps - you can now join teamspeak with phones. I am unsure whether other voice comms have this feature.

 

Now mumble i look at like the little brother of teamspeak.

It utilizes the same audio codecs as teamspeak and is almost on par with teamspeak skinning wise but still is missing some major parts. It doesn't have any file transfer options and very few plugins exist for the program itself.

 

So lets be fair and say all voice comms are decent in terms of sound and if that's all you need they will all do the job. However if you want that little bit of extra you will have to more or less exclude ventrilo due to it's lack of file transfers, skinning and overall flexibility.

 

Here is my rating on the voice comms weighing extra features

feel free to disagree and correct me if im missing vital parts.

 

Teamspeak 9 / 10 - i want better overlay tool - although it is present and working it want to customize it further.

Mumble 7 / 10 - same framework and audio as teamspeak but simply lacks too many features.

Ventrilo 6 / 10 Still a decent sound program however it seems to be a remnant of the past in terms of development.

[Sippix]

I would barely give Vent a 3/10. The only thing that scores it a 3 is the no-hands voice-activated PTT. But even that is severely gimped compared to TS and Mumble. It just listens for increase in ambient volume and begins recording, where-as Mumble and TS3 actually use voice recognition to discern between you pounding furiously on your keyboard and then actually speaking into the mic.

[Arellea]

In terms of actual functionality (actually being able to communicate effectively and efficiently with other players) all three get the job done just fine. I personally switch between vent and ts3 depending on who I happen to be playing with.

 

The ability to customize codecs on TS3 is undeniably better, I'm not sure I'd consider the bandwidth effects all that important however, as voice bandwidth is not all that high (this may be important to some individuals, particularly if you have, or play with someone who has, highly limited bandwidth)

 

All 3 programs do have mobile device apps although they may not all be available on all mobile OSs. I know iOS has all three, although the mumble app is the only one that is free (a positive point in mumble's favor for any iPhone user).

 

The other features I would personally describe as fluff and consider largely irrelevant. If you're interested in fluff, then for sure TS3 is the way to go, otherwise I'd say all 3 will get the job done just fine.