hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3503.txt

Episode: 3503
Title: HPR3503: Configuring Mumble
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3503/hpr3503.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:35:55

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 353 for Wednesday the 5th of January 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Configuring Mumble, It is hosted by Ken Fallon, and is about
15 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, in this episode we will show you how to connect to the HDR Community
Mumble.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon, and you are listening to another episode of Haka
Public Radio.
Today we are going to be talking about how to connect to Mumble, a server, and joining
the room, particularly the HDR Community Room on Dell Wens server.
Some of this will be generic, and some of this will be specific to the HDR use case.
I'll try and keep you informed as to which is which.
If you've never come across Mumble before, it's a chat client that was developed for the
gaming community, and it is a bit like visiting your hotel on an audio.
And the hotel has various different conference rooms that you can go in and attend meetings.
Depending on whether you're registered or not, or you have permissions for that room,
you might be restricted to listening only, or you might even be allowed into the rooms.
But the HDR room, you're allowed to go in and speak, and when you speak you will hear
others in the room will hear what you're saying, and when they speak they will, you
will also hear what they're saying.
There's also a chat section there that you can use as well for sharing text.
However, specifically in the Hit Pure New Year show, we tend to use an online shared
document, and that makes storing of the show notes a lot easier.
So we would ask you for that, that's specific to use that additional option.
Another thing, it's far better to use a microphone and headset from Mumble, and position
as close to your mouth as possible, but a little bit off to the side that way, you don't
get the heavy breathing sounds as much.
And in this specifically, we will request that you, for HDR, all HDR events that you
set up, push the talk, and you disable text to speech for in the chat.
And as I said in the chat, it's really annoying if you're there and somebody pays in a big
long link, and then text to speech starts speaking out the link that is there, and microphone
speaking up as some are participant in the room is speaking.
So that's quite annoying and disrupts the flow.
So we won't be doing that.
And we will also configure a key on your keyboard to be a push to talk key, and what that
means is when you want to speak, you press that key down, and only when you have that key
pressed down will what you say go into the room.
And the reason we do that is the other options that are available to you can be triggered
by a dog barking or a car going past or a fire alarm or something, that's happening.
And then you've walked away to get yourself a cup of tea and all of a sudden the noise
from your microphone is coming in and interfering with the flow in the room.
So those are the important things.
Other than that, they install, when you install the mumble software, which you can download
from the website, you're not going to be going through that because there's how-to's
on the website and it's different per operating system and distribution.
When you run mumble the first time, there's a few things you need to do.
You need to, there'll be a first run wizard which you can run through, and we'll be stepping
through that.
Then there's the process of connecting to his server, depending on how you do this.
If you click on the link that's in the show notes for this episode, you get direct to
the Dell One server and direct into the HPR room.
But normally if you do this after the first run wizard, you'll be popped up with whatever
you want to connect to.
But we'll be going through all of this anyway.
So you install the software in the very first time that you run it, you get the introduction,
which will be the mumble audio wizard.
And you can also trigger that via the audio menu at any time.
So you click next on the first screen and you'll be presented with the devices that you
want to use as an input and an output.
Now mostly that's set up to go to your default sound system and within the operating system,
default sound system, for example, on Linux of Puls Audio.
Within that Puls Audio Vodium control, you can then control which microphone that you're
using.
And as I say, you want to be using a separate headset and microphone rather than the
built in one that's in your laptop.
So you can click next on that page and then you go to the page where you can device tune
the latency.
So obviously some audio is recorded and you can change the slider over and back.
That's not very critical for HPR discussions, might be more critical if you're doing gameplay.
And then we go to the next page by clicking next and you go to the volume tuning page where
you can set the audio levels, you're presented with a bar.
Blue is too quiet, green is the good zone and red is too loud.
So you don't want to be in the red zone and you can just say a few words.
And as you slide, there's a slider over and back underneath there.
You can slide that over and back and then you'll get to decide what levels is comfortable
for you.
Again, usually this is the defaults are usually fine and you can just click next.
On the audio tuning screen, tuning wizard, we'll now present you with the voice activity
detection page.
And this is the one, this is a very important one where we're going to select push to talk.
Now I can tell you which one to use, I use the cap locks key because I don't, I have,
I don't use the cap locks key and I have it disabled on my system.
So what I do is I click the push to talk, click in the box there and then press the cap locks
key.
And once you've done that, you can press next.
The next thing you'll present with is the quality and notifications quality is usually
fine.
You can leave it as balanced.
It's fine.
But the notifications, this is where you can go in and disable text to speech and use
sound instead.
So that's where we set that setting.
And you can press next.
Then it will pay back some audio for you.
And if you use the headphones, you can click the use headphones button, but again, the
defaults are normally fine.
So click next and click finish.
And the very first time that you run a mumble, once the audio test wizard has finished,
it will ask you to create a client certificate and it does this so that you can uniquely identify
your client among all the servers rather than having to put in a username and password every
time.
Automatic certificate creation is absolutely fine.
Just click next on that and then that will be a press finish and you're pretty much done.
So at this point, if you're working on the hgur link, go to the hgur room.
You will be selecting from one of the public servers.
So there's various different worldwide regions where you can join mumble servers, but you
can also add your own by pressing add new.
And then you can enter in the address.
And in our case, it's chatter.sky with any haven.net.
The port is 64738, which is the default one.
And then your username, whatever you choose, most people choose to run on air handle.
In my case for this, I'm going to be picking Ken one because I have Ken used in other places.
And then I just use chatter.sky haven.net as the label.
The correct spelling of that is in the show notes.
I advise you to do a copy and paste in that one.
It's important to think a little bit about the username that you do want to use because
once you register, remember I said that you need to register in order to get access to
some rooms, basically, on some servers.
So just think about that.
And then you press OK, and then your server set up.
If you haven't done that, and you've gone straight to clicking the link after the first
mumble walkthrough has finished, you'll be brought to a page which will ask you to enter
your nickname, are you using it, and you can put that in and press OK again the same
morning as before.
In all cases, you will be presented with a certificate for the server that you're trying
to connect to.
And it should begin with a 0, 9, 22, 0, 5, and end with a 3, 2, 9, c for Charlie, 2, 3.
And you just confirm that that tells you basically what server you're connecting to.
And you can press yes on that.
So everything we're talking about now is specifically to, in relation to the chatterdeskaihaven.net
server that I won't provide for us.
And you'll be dropped into the root, which is essentially the lobby of the hotel.
And you're going to see a lot of rooms, and there I see Colonel Panic, Lennykin in the
house, the link's like, Telk Show, Dev random, etc.
And I also see the HPR room.
So what you could do, but you're not going to, you could pick, click on your, on your
own icon.
It usually be highlights us and you can drag it into any of those rooms.
The room that you are going to drag your icon into first is the audio test room.
And it's always good to do this, even if you're connecting to the server for the seventh
it time.
It doesn't matter.
Always very handy to go in there.
And that is a separate room that's been set up for you so that when you go in, it'll
create a loop back.
So if you go in there as Ken one, they will, you will find that there's a new user created
in there called mimic dash, Ken one, in my case.
And anything that they, that I say, will be repeated back to me.
So I'm in route, I drag myself, click and hold on my icon, drag myself over the test
room box and let go of the mouse and then I'm now in that room.
Sometimes on the left hand side where you can, where there's a text box, it will say
you just joined that room.
I will give you, you just joined audio test test and then immediately after that it says
that mimic dash, Ken one has connected and mimic dash, Ken one has entered the room.
So that's a script that's up to the repeaterbot who is OP, OP, the repeaterbot will do when
you move into the room.
So that's a, that's a good place to check out your audio.
Now when you say something, it'll be repeated back to you in 10 seconds.
This is just a configuration of this particular server in this particular room.
And don't forget to press your push to talk key because everybody forgets to push to talk
key if you've ever heard, sorry, it was amused.
It's the same thing, same sort of meme here, you push to, don't get to push it, you push
to talk.
Good thing to press your push to talk and just go count to 10 slowly and then that will
also tell you, you will hear back then the sounds.
And as you're talking, your icon will turn from green to blue and it will have like circles
come out of its ears like zifters, you know, the Wi-Fi emanating radiation sort of thing
from around your head, like a halo, I guess.
And that way you know you're talking on older versions of a mumble, it's, you're like
I'm turned into red lips.
So if you hear people talking about red lips, you know where that's coming from there.
And if you hear your audio back, as I did when I was doing this test and it was absolutely
terrible, the reason more than likely is that your connection is not picking up your headset,
headphone and mic.
So using your, using using your laptop one.
So what you can do is then press your push to talk key and then likely tap the microphone
that you're going to be using and then you should hear that tapping coming back.
If you tap your external one, there's no way that the laptop would have detected that.
So you, you can tell which one is, is the issue.
And in my case, I'm using Pulse Audio Volume Control, P-A-V-V-U Control to switch devices.
And what I do there is I open it up and then press the recording section and it says
mumble, microphone and from and there I can select my external H2 microphone.
And while I'm there, I also go and check the playback section and you should see mumble
and mumble speakers on and then this says my wireless Bluetooth headset.
So satisfied that our audio is good.
We can say something again, click and drag yourself from the audio test room into the
HQR room and that's it, Bob Jean, who makes your hand and tells you your first cousin.
You might want to register yourself so you can do that by your icon, you can do it in
the room for anywhere really, it doesn't really matter which room.
You can right click and then it pops up a menu that says change comments and message mute
deaf and etc. And in that case, you can click on the box register and that says you're
about to register yourself on the server, this section cannot be undone and you use a name
cannot be changed once this is done and will be forever known as Kenmon on this server.
Are you sure you want to register yourself and I chose yes, so that's it and you're now
all set to use mumble.
Enjoy.
I would advise like everything else, the HQR room conventions are going to be different
to deaf random or some other rooms, some will have listening only rooms and some will
have speak rooms.
So have a listen, see what other people are doing and enjoy using the software.
That's it now.
Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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