Set up a Mumble server – a how to for mumble server hosting

Anyone who spends a lot of time in mul­ti­play­er games knows the problem. In-game voice chat rarely has the quality you need for suc­cess­ful team com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Also, for the co­or­di­na­tion before, between, and after the games, you also need a solution to be able to talk. While Skype and TeamSpeak were the undis­put­ed top dogs of voice chat software for many years, there are now more and more in­ter­est­ing products that challenge them.

Mumble is an open-source solution that allows anyone to create their own server - whether private or pro­fes­sion­al.

A community of de­vel­op­ers has been working on the voice-chat software Mumble since 2005. With this, many people can talk to each other at the same time online. The software can be down­loaded for free from the official Mumble website and is available for Windows, Ubuntu and macOS. In addition, you can also download mobile apps for Android and iOS, although the iPhone version has been dis­con­tin­ued for several years.

Mumble offers many features that go beyond the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a normal online phone call, such as:

• Encrypted com­mu­ni­ca­tion: The trans­mis­sion between server and client is encrypted via OCB-AES128 and thus cannot be overheard by third parties.
• In-game overlay: You can control the Mumble client, in a smaller window, even if another program is running in full screen mode.
• Al­lo­ca­tion of rights: As an ad­min­is­tra­tor of a Mumble server you can define which user gets which rights.
• Po­si­tion­al audio: To simulate a room sound in games, Mumble can detect the position of the players in some games and adjust the sound ac­cord­ing­ly.
• Noise reduction: Mumble uses filters to remove noise in the back­ground of the speaker and to transmit the voice more clearly.

TeamSpeak has long been the go-to software when it comes to voice chat, es­pe­cial­ly in the gaming world. Even though the program is still a good contender, there are now com­peti­tors on the market that are appealing due to certain ad­van­tages - including Mumble. The biggest dif­fer­ence between Mumble and TeamSpeak is the license. While TeamSpeak is pro­pri­etary software, i.e. owned and developed by a company, Mumble is open-source.

So, many different programs are available for Mumble, which all have their ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. You can use “skins” to adapt the ap­pear­ance of the client, or Bots, which do tasks on the server – both of which can be found online. The highly-motivated developer community plays in Mumble’s favor.

A major advantage of Mumble over TeamSpeak is that the open-source solution is par­tic­u­lar­ly resource efficient. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly important in the gaming world because if you want to play a modern, high-res­o­lu­tion game, the voice chat software shouldn’t put ad­di­tion­al strain on the computer. That is why Mumble is pro­grammed to be par­tic­u­lar­ly slim on the client side.

The client requires few system resources and runs on prac­ti­cal­ly any computer. You only need a mi­cro­phone to par­tic­i­pate in the con­ver­sa­tions. When creating a Mumble server, on the other hand (of­fi­cial­ly called Murmur), you have to keep a few points in mind so that everyone can com­mu­ni­cate with each other without problems.

Murmur is quite open as far as the operating system is concerned. The only re­quire­ment is that the system can compile Qt. Qt is a framework for de­vel­op­ing programs and is supported by Windows, macOS, and many Unix de­riv­a­tives. So, in terms of the OS of the server, you have rel­a­tive­ly free rein.

Mumble doesn’t require much pro­cess­ing power on the server side. The CPU is almost only affected by the en­cryp­tion. This means that even with lots of users on the server, CPU should never be a problem. The de­vel­op­ers them­selves run a test server with 3.4 GHz, which only has to use 1% of the CPU power with 4 users at the same time.

The RAM is also hardly used in a Mumble server. The RAM is mainly used for buffering the voice streams. For example, 512 MB is rec­om­mend­ed for a server with 50 users at the same time.

Murmur is a very small program and therefore requires hardly any hard disk space. The in­stal­la­tion file measures just over 10 MB.

Mumble requires suf­fi­cient network bandwidth to ensure that com­mu­ni­ca­tion happens without dis­rup­tions. This depends on how many people are using the server at the same time. Want to determine the exact bandwidth required for your project? You can use this formula:

63 kbit/s X number of total users X number of speakers.

The 63 kbit/s is a rec­om­men­da­tion. A maximum of 134 kbit/s can be planned per user, although this amount is not necessary. Also consider that no more than two people can speak at the same time anyway and the third factor of the cal­cu­la­tion (number of speakers) should therefore be 2.

Renting the server from a pro­fes­sion­al hosting provider like IONOS is rec­om­mend­ed. In principle, you can also create a Mumble server on a local computer at home, but this often fails on account of two reasons. First, as a home user, you usually don’t have a static IP address. Your Internet provider assigns you a new IP address at regular intervals, after which the users of your server would also have to reconnect. With a real data center, you wouldn’t have any problems with this. Secondly, bandwidth can be a problem. If you also want to play games over the same network con­nec­tion, you may ex­pe­ri­ence lag. With a pro­fes­sion­al server package, you can rely on the guar­an­teed bandwidth.

With IONOS, you have three different types of servers at your disposal:

• Dedicated Server
• vServer package
• Cloud Server

The three server models differ primarily in price and billing. The cloud server is billed per minute and only for the services you have booked. You can increase or decrease the ca­pac­i­ties at any time via the Control Center, which has a direct impact on your costs. The vServer (a virtual server en­vi­ron­ment), on the other hand, can only be booked on a monthly basis - and the costs are in­de­pen­dent of your actual usage.

With these models, you have no fixed hardware assigned to you. This is different with the dedicated server. With this model, you are assigned physical proces­sors, hard disks and RAM that only you can access. However, this solution is also cor­re­spond­ing­ly expensive.

Which server is suitable for you? In principle, you only need a small server package for Mumble, but you probably use the server not only for the voice chat software but run a mul­ti­play­er game at the same time. As an example, we present various scenarios that also include a Valheim server and a Minecraft server.

The Mumble server Murmur is easy to install - it can be tricky for beginners, though. Our step-by-step guide takes you through the in­stal­la­tion and shows the con­fig­u­ra­tion options. We’ll install the software on a cloud server from IONOS with Windows as the operating system.

The remote con­nec­tion software will now ask you for a password. You can also find this in the Cloud Panel. After entering it, connect and see the operating system of your server in a new window. In principle, you’ll work here in exactly the same way as on your home computer.

You can make the following changes:

• wel­come­text: If you want to welcome the par­tic­i­pants of your server with an in­di­vid­u­al­ized message, you can customize it here. HTML tags are available for for­mat­ting.
• port: 64738 is already entered as the default port. You have allowed this port in the previous step.
• server­pass­word: If you start your server without setting a password, every Mumble user can access it and listen to or par­tic­i­pate in your con­ver­sa­tions via the software. It is therefore rec­om­mend­ed that you set a secure password.
• bandwidth: You can limit the maximum bandwidth per user. This is useful if you plan to have a par­tic­u­lar­ly large number of users on the server and the default settings might exceed the hoster’s per­for­mance.
• users: If you don’t want your server to be visited by too many users at the same time, you can limit the maximum number.
• reg­is­ter­Name: Give the main channel of your Mumble server a unique name so that users can better associate the channel.

To find the options, scroll down in the file or use the search function of the text editor. The entry is made directly after the equal sign - without a space in between. In most cases the con­fig­u­ra­tion file is already filled in and you only have to change the entries.

Es­pe­cial­ly if you plan to invite many users to your server, you should make yourself an ad­min­is­tra­tor be­fore­hand. To do this, first register your own username by logging in via the client as described. Then you will find the option “Register” under the menu item “Self”. Now you only have to confirm that you really want to register on the server with your chosen name.

You have now reg­is­tered your own username on the server, but you still have to give it admin rights. Murmur has im­ple­ment­ed the SuperUser for this purpose. This user has all rights - but cannot speak on a server. So, the role is only meant for an ad­min­is­tra­tor. First you log out with your reg­is­tered username. Then you set the password for the SuperUser. This is done from the command line of the server. On Windows, navigate to the Mumble directory and then enter the following line:

Under Linux, the process works quite similarly:

After that, you log out of the server again and use your actual username when logging in again. This user now has admin rights and can therefore control other users on the server. You don’t need the SuperUser account for the time being.