VoRS: Vo(IP) Simple Alternative to Mumble

&gt; users tend to complain about [Mumble&#x27;s] newer client versions quality and convenience.<p>I have never heard anyone complain about Mumble&#x27;s UX. Especially not that it has gotten worse. Or it&#x27;s resource usage, which is practically unnoticeable on any average system sold past 2005. It&#x27;s the best-in-class and has only gotten better.

&gt; WebRTC-based solutions are insane bloated incredible monsters [...] They work mainly only if you use the same kind of software and codecs, for example Chromium[...]<p>That&#x27;s just not true anymore these days. I&#x27;ve used WebRTC between Firefox, Safari, and Chrome without any issues.<p>&gt; only if you use the same kind of software and codecs, for example Chromium, that requires dozens of gigabytes of disk space and much RAM, CPU time to build it.<p>There seem to be non-browser implementations [1] [2], although I can&#x27;t vouch for their quality.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liburtc.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liburtc.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;awslabs&#x2F;amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webrtc-sdk-c">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;awslabs&#x2F;amazon-kinesis-video-streams-webr...</a>

&gt; You have to verify downloaded tarballs authenticity to be sure that you retrieved trusted and untampered software.<p>I&#x27;m not able to access the site over TLS, so this is currently impossible. Anyone else have better luck?<p><pre><code> (from the installation instructions) $ [fetch|wget] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vors.stargrave.org&#x2F;download&#x2F;. vors-2.3.0.tar.zst $ [fetch|wget] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vors.stargrave.org&#x2F;download&#x2F;vors-2.3.0.tar.zst.sig [verify signature] $ tar xf vors-2.3.0.tar.zst </code></pre> Guarantees nothing, if you&#x27;re actually being attacked. You can&#x27;t serve out the tarball <i>and</i> the public key[0] <i>and</i> the signature insecurely and get any guarantees about authenticity.<p>[0]:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vors.stargrave.org&#x2F;PUBKEY-SSH.pub" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vors.stargrave.org&#x2F;PUBKEY-SSH.pub</a>

The _biggest_ selling point with mumble (though I&#x27;ve not used it in anger in about a decade) was the way it tied in with the game you were playing and gave you in-game spacial audio.<p>Stand next to someone in game and they came through loud and clear. Move away from them sideway and it&#x27;s now quieter and only through one headphone... I found it extremely novel and immersive when I used to play FPS games; everyone on mumble but absolutely not like being in a chatroom.

&gt;...its server side is still written on Qt, which requires hundreds of megabytes of additional libraries to build it up.<p>See:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;umurmur&#x2F;umurmur">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;umurmur&#x2F;umurmur</a>

I wonder if there are plans to offer a &quot;headless&quot; mode where call-status is streamed to an FD instead of using a TUI. I&#x27;d love to be able to compose&#x2F;wrap this tool outside of a terminal emulator.<p>I&#x27;ve been idly hacking on something quite similar but using QUIC instead. One of the downsides with QUIC of course is that it assumes TLS by default which makes it inefficient for use on encrypted transports (like wireguard, zerotier, tailscale, or yggdrassil.) I&#x27;ll definitely give this a go as I&#x27;m a big fan of NNCP, another project by the author.

I&#x27;m not sure I understand the reason why; for non-browser, you can set up a FreePBX or something in 20 minutes and it will work with any softphone. But if I was to use a chat today, I&#x27;d use something in-browser, so based on WebRTC and incidentally peer-to-peer (well, kinda, but voice&#x2F;video flow will be). So not sure I understand who&#x2F;what this is for.

This is REALLY important software nowadays imho.<p>I&#x27;m old enough to have spoken to people on analogue land lines: the sound was crisp, you could hear small background noises, you could hear someone breathe.<p>Nowadays we usually speak to people on digital lines that are highly compressed (to the extend that is messes with the sound quality), low freq range (no bass, very high sounds) and cut up (without enough sound or when then other party makes more sound the stream is completely interrupted).<p>And it does not have to be like this! All of this is in favour of the network operator (or centralized chat servers e.g. whatsapp) trying to save some data&#x2F;money. While many of us have paid for unlimited data!<p>On top of that much of the conversations are not properly e2e encrypted!<p>I&#x27;ve used Mumble to speak to people I love over long distance and the quality is just so much better: it&#x27;s like the analog experience of my childhood. Hearing ever breath, background noise and all in high quality makes all the difference some times.

This is great but would need to run on windows for the typical mumble use-case of gaming.<p>It would also be great to have this running on ESP32 or similar, so you could make dedicated IP desk intercoms - I envisage a star-trek style intercom, with each button being a channel that you can join by pushing it in (can join multiple simultaneously).

It mentions WebRTC but this project wouldn&#x27;t work in browsers as it&#x27;s a Go CLI tool. Is there any alternative to WebRTC nowadays? How far along is WebTransport? Anything else that could rely on older web tech?

Anyone able to find the source code? Can&#x27;t see it listed anywhere

unrelated, but I wonder if anyone can identify the terminal font used in the screenshot? I am looking for a good (free) serif monospaced font.

&gt;No GUI requirement. Why would someone need a GUI for voice application? But a fancy real-time refreshing TUI would be desirable. Mumble tends to output no information, sometimes hiding the fact of a problem and that everything stopped working.<p>Eh why would someone need a fancy real-time refreshing TUI for a voice application? Just write logs to stderr and status updates to stdout like regular people.<p>Honestly, go a step further. Take microphone audio in on stdin and produce speaker audio out on stdout. Then you can skip ALSA&#x2F;OSS&#x2F;jack&#x2F;pipewire&#x2F;pulseaudio support and just leave that to the user to compose.