Mumble dreams
With everyone switching to remote tools for social distancing, I've been using Mumble) more and more. That's partly by choice -- I don't like videoconferencing much, frankly -- and partly by necessity: sometimes my web browser fails and Mumble is generally more reliable.
Some friend on a mailing list recently asked "shouldn't we make Mumble better?" and opened the door for me to go on a long "can I get a pony?" email. Because I doubt anyone on that mailing list has the time or capacity to actually fix those issues, I figured I would copy this to a broader audience in the hope that someone else would pick it up.
Why Mumble rocks
Before I go on with the UI critique, I should show why care: Mumble is awesome.
When you do manage to configure it correctly, Mumble just works; it's highly reliable. It uses little CPU, both on the client and the server side, and can have rooms with tens if not hundreds of participants. The server can be easily installed and configured: there's a Debian package and resource requirements are minimal. It's basically network-bound. There are at least three server implementations, the official one called Murmur, the minimalist umurmur and Grumble, a Go rewrite.
It has great quality: echo canceling, when correctly configured, is
solid okay and latency is minimal. It has "overlays" so you can use it
while gaming or demo'ing in full screen while still having an idea of
who's talking. It also supports positional audio for gaming that
integrates with popular games like Counterstrike or Half-Life. It even
has support for cross-linking different "rooms" which allow all sorts
of features. For example, Mayfirst use it for interpretation (AKA
"simultaneous translation").
It's moderately secure: it doesn't support end-to-end encryption, but client/server communication is encrypted and authenticated with (mutual) TLS (for the control channel) and OCB-AES-128 over UDP (for media). It supports a server password and some moderation mechanisms.
UI improvements
Mumble should be smarter about a bunch of things. Having all those settings is nice for geeky control freaks, but it makes the configuration absolutely unusable for most people. Hide most settings by default, and make better defaults.
Specifically, those should be on by default:
- RNNoise
- echo cancellation (the proper "monitor" channels)
- pre-configured shortcut for PTT (Push To Talk) -- right-shift is my favorite
- "double-PTT" to hold it enabled
- be more silent by default (I understand why it would want to do voice synthesis, but it would need to be much better at it before it's default)
The echo test should be more accessible, one or two clicks away from the main UI. I have only found out about that feature when someone told me where to find it. This basically means to take it out of the settings page and into its own dialog.
The basic UI should be much simpler. It could look something like Jitsi: just one giant mute button with a list of speakers. Basically:
Take that status bar and make it use the entire space of the main window
Push the chat and room list dialog to separate, optional dialog (e.g. the room list could be a popup on login, but we don't need to continuously see the damn thing)
Show the name of the person talking in the main UI, along with other speakers (Big Blue Button does this well: just a label that fades away with time after a person talks)
Some features could be better explained. For example, the "overlay" feature makes no sense at all for most users. It only makes sense when you're a gamer and use Mumble alongside another full-screen program, to show you who's talking.
Improved authentication. The current authentication systems in Mumble are somewhat limited: the server can have a shared password to get access to it, and from there it's pretty much free-for-all. There are client certificates but those are hard to understand and the most common usage scenario is that someone manages to configure it once, forgets about it and then cannot login again with the same username.
It should be easier to get the audio right. Now, to be fair, this is hard to do in any setup, and Mumble is only a part of this. There are way too many moving parts in Linux for this to be easy: between your hardware, ALSA drivers, Pulseaudio mixers and Mumble, too many things can go wrong. So this is a general problem when doing multimedia in general, and the Linux ecosystem in particular, but Mumble is especially hard to configure in there.
Improved speaker stats. When you right-click on a user in Mumble, you get detailed stats about the user: packet loss, latency, bandwidth, codecs... It's pretty neat. But that is hard to parse for a user. Jitsi, in contrast, shows a neat little "bar graph" (similar to what you get on a cell phone) with a color code to show network conditions for that user. Then you can drill down to show more information. Having that info for the user would be really useful to figure out which user is causing that echo or latency. Heck, while I'm dreaming, we could do the same thing Jitsi and tell the user when we detect too much noise on their side and suggest muting!
There's probably more UI issues, but at that point you have basically rebuilt the entire user interface. This problem is hard to fix because UX people are unlikely to have the skills required to hack at an (old) Qt app, and C++ hackers are unlikely to have the best UX skills...
Missing features
Video. It has been on the roadmap since 2011, so I'm not holding my breath. It is, obviously, the key feature missing from the software when compared to other conferencing tools and it's nice to see they are considering it. Screensharing and whiteboarding would also be a nice addition. Unfortunately, all that is a huge undertaking and it's unlikely to happen in the short term. And even if it does, it's possible hard-core Mumble users would be really upset at the change...
A good web app -- a major blocker to the adoption of Mumble is the need for that complex app. If users could join just with a web browser, adoption would be much easier. There is a web app called mumble-web out there, but it seems to work only for listening as there are numerous problems with recording: quality issues, audio glitches, voice activation, voice activation.. The CCC seems to be using that app to stream talk translation, so that part supposedly works correctly.
Dial-in -- allow plain old telephones to call into
conferences. There seems to be a program called mumsi that can do
this, but it's unmaintained and it's unclear if any of the forks
work at all. Update: according to samba, mumsi works, but
sometimes freezes and needs to be restarted. Each SIP account shows up
as a bot that comes up when someone calls the number. It supports
multiple callers, although apparently mumsi crashes after a while
with 4 callers. A comment here also mentioned there's a fork that
mentions using a "pin" as well for dialing in.
Caveats
Now the above will probably not happen soon. Unfortunately, Mumble has
had trouble with their release process recently. It took them a long
time to even agree on releasing 1.3, and when they did agree, it took
them a long time again to actually do the release. There has been much
more activity on the Mumble client and web app recently, so
hopefully I will be proven wrong. The 1.3.1 release actually came
out recently(correction:) is actually being worked on,
which is encouraging.
All in all, mumble has some deeply ingrained UI limitations. it's built like an app from the 1990, all the way down to the menu system and "status bar" buttons. It's definitely not intuitive for a new user and while there's an audio wizard that can help you get started, it doesn't always work and can be confusing in itself.
I understand that I'm just this guy saying "please make this for me ktxbye". I'm not writing this as a critic of Mumble: I love the little guy, the underdog. Mumble has been around forever and it kicks ass. I'm writing this in a spirit of solidarity, in the hope the feedback can be useful and to provide useful guidelines on how things could be improved. I wish I had the time to do this myself and actually help the project beyond just writing, but unfortunately the reality is I'm a poor UI designer and I have little time to contribute to more software projects.
So hopefully someone could take those ideas and make Mumble even greater. And if not, we'll just have to live with it.
Thanks to all the Mumble developers who, over all those years, managed to make and maintain such an awesome product. You rock!
Update: a chat with Mumble folks
Update: it seems the idea of simplifying the Mumble interface will
take some time to sink in. After presenting this article in the
#mumble Freenode IRC channel, it became obvious that having a more
usable interface is not a priority. To put it in the words of a
participant in the channel:
If someone is too stupid to use a piece of software than they should probably use something else or have someone capable of critical thinking set it up for them. -- meep
So I guess "I'm with stupid": I do not believe we should make software only for "smart" people because that leads to overly complicated and over-engineered user interfaces that are needlessly hard to use and configure. Mumble is actually an excellent example of such programs: powerful software, but too hard to use to actually reach critical mass.
Thankfully, meep is not a Mumble developer and does not actually
represent the official position of the Mumble project. A core
developer (not representing the project either) was
more nuanced:
The UI being not up to date is a matter of taste. The kind of UI you are describing is the kind of UI I certainly don't want. More gernally though I agree that the UI needs some rework and especially: Flexibility so that each user can (ideally) make it appear as (s)he wants. Before this can happen though, we'll have to rewrite a fair bit of code as we'll have to separate backend and frontend from one another. -- krzmbrzl
So this will take time. The fact that Qt seems to be moving back to closed-source does not help the situation with Mumble's GUI development, unfortunately. But the other hand, maybe it will provide the necessary "kick" to write a new, simpler GUI.
Mumble echo cancellation is superb. Its really one of those programs that just works how they are expected
But i think it should be done at pulse level and it should be done by default. And if its not on by default, distros should have an easy way to activate it
In window i never had to worry about this things. Mic just worked (tm)
Pulse have an echo cancellation module but its awful to use and it just doesnt work as well as mumble does
(I thought i should add this to your it would be nice list. Not only upstream mumble can improve. Distros can do something to improve this too
i've recently set up a mumble server after using many other tools including teamspeak, discord, riot and jitsi. i feel like i have the most control here and it is lightweight and 'just works'.
it feels odd that given mumble has so many things going for it, the folks working on it give a sense of just having had enough. it took me a while to get mumble bot set up as all the guides were at least 10 years out of date and the only one that ended up working was in German.
so i'm totally with you