My friends and I originally used Ventrilo for our voice communications during long sessions of WoW raiding and other games; along the way we eventually started using Skype as it didn’t require a server and we didn’t have to push a button to talk. Somehow I stumbled upon this video demonstrating the latency differences between Mumble and Ventrilo and immediately decided that we should be using Mumble for voice chat.

There seems to be plenty of sites you can order Mumble servers from but I decided it would be a good learning experience to build my own from the ground up. I spun up a new CentOS droplet at DigitalOcean and followed the instructions at a blog I found. If you use this guide, you’ll find your mumble.ini configuration file under /opt/mumble-server – the Mumble Wiki has the details on each parameter but Mumble will just work out of the box without doing anything further. Additionally, if you want to use a real SSL cert with Mumble like I did, you can use this guide from the Mumble Wiki.