Audio Tuning
From Mumble
IMPORTANT: The content of this page is outdated. If you have checked or updated this page and found the content to be suitable, please remove this notice.
This explains how to tune your sound settings for optimal performance. All of this is done through the Config|Settings dialog. Note that unless you have manually tuned your network stack in Windows, you will get better performance with UDP mode at the cost of higher bandwidth usage. This tuning guide assumes you are using UDP; with TCP most buffering values need to be higher.
translations
Contents |
Audio Output
This will explain how to improve the sound that you hear.
Tuning the output delay
Have a friend put his Basic Audio/Transmit to Continuous, and have him read something (today's paper, back of a milk carton, his diary). Now, turn DirectSound/Output Delay to 120ms and hit Apply. Wait 2-3 seconds, and if audio is OK, turn Output Delay down a notch and hit Apply again. Do this until the voice sounds like a radio with very bad reception; then turn Output Delay up a notch.
If your audio card has no hardware mixing, you are likely to have to tune this up a notch or two if there are many people speaking at once. If your audio card has excellent hardware mixing (SB Audigy 2 equivalent), just put this at 20ms and be happy.
Note; if you do not have a friend handy to do this, you can set up murmur in loop mode and user yourself as test.
Tuning 3D audio
If you are playing with positional audio, you want to set Direct Sound/Method to Panning. Only use the HRTF modes if you have a state-of-the-art audio card, otherwise audio computation will start eating CPU time. The defaults for distance and rolloff are probably ok, but feel free to tune them. Pay attention to the information at the bottom which informs you of minimum intensity.
Do not change the doppler setting, we have yet to find a sound card which does doppler correct; you will get the doppler effect, but the sound card will also play the sound slower or faster, meaning you will either get audio lag or run out of audio data. Actually, while you are in there, set Plugins/Transmit to Position.
Tuning network latency
As with all gaming, make sure you are not running any file sharing, background FTPs, rsyncs, trojans or virii that use your bandwidth.
Have a friend put his Basic Audio/Transmit to Push-To-Talk and set up a hotkey. Turn Basic Audio/Default Jitter Buffer to its minimum. Have your friend start talking, and push the button midsentence (talk, then push). If there is stuttering in the first quarter second of his transmission, increase Default Jitter Buffer, hit Apply and try again. Once you are happy, increase the Default Jitter Buffer by another 20ms to compensate for in-game traffic.
It is sort of vital that you do this test with a real server on the internet; everyone can use the minimum on their local LAN.
Audio Input
If you use ASIO, read below for the ASIO input guide.
Microphone Volume
Open the Settings dialog, and turn Basic Audio/Amp to its maximum.
Open the Audio menu and hit Statistics. Also open whatever program you use to control volume in windows; for most users this is simply sndvol32.exe. Select Options|Properties, select Recording and make sure Microphone or Mic is selected. This should return you to the audio mixer. Make sure only the microphone is selected, and turn its volume to maximum. If there is an Advanced button, click it and turn on any boost you can find.
Select Audio|Reset. Watch the Audio Statistics window and say something loud. About as loud as you will when you get repeatedly shot by a cheater after a perfect round. Even if you do not plan to transmit anything that loud, we are tuning the peak level of the microphone. Watch the Microphone Loudness level. If it goes above 100%, adjust the microphone recording volume and try again; you want the Microphone Loudness as close to 100%, but not above. Remember to click Audio|Reset each time you adjust the volume.
Now, lean back a bit and talk real soft. As soft as you would when it is 4 AM and you are afraid to wake your mother or significant other. Take note of the lowest value Microphone Loudness has while you are still talking (ignore the lows it goes to during silence). Go back into the Settings dialog, and turn Basic Audio/Amp so that <math>Minimum Loudness * Amp = 100%</math>. For example, if the minimum loudness value you saw during speech was 20%, set Amp to 5.0. This ensures that Mumble will not get overly eager searching for voice; without this cap it could start pickup up conversations outside the room during long silence periods.
Voice Hold
Mumble has proper voice detection, so we strongly recommend that people set Basic Audio/Transmit to Voice Activity. Once done, adjust Voice Hold until it no longer stops transmitting during short silences in your sentences. Most of the time you can just keep it at 1000ms.
Quality / Complexity
These two control the compression of audio. Quality determines peak bandwidth and Complexity determines peak CPU. As there is quite a lot of packet overhead on UDP, turning Quality below 5 will not result in very much bandwidth gain, and above 8 you will not notice any difference. Increasing complexity above 5 will probably not give any noticeable results.
ASIO
You may choose to use ASIO as your input method. ASIO is a very low latency, multichannel audio input/output method, supported on studio quality audio cards. You should expect to find this on Audigy class soundcards, and probably not on anything "cheaper". The only reason to use ASIO is if you need echo cancellation; such as when playing with loudspeakers. If you use the classical headset or headphones and microphone, you are better off using DirectSound as input since it uses less CPU resources.
ASIO works directly with raw input, before any mixing is applied, so the tuning of microphone volume you did earlier is now useless; ASIO does not use the sound mixer.
To configure ASIO input, open the ASIO tab in the Settings Dialog. If you see no driver names in the Device combobox, you have no ASIO drivers installed. If you do see one, select it and press Query. Be aware that some ASIO drivers have bugs in them, and this might cause Mumble to become unresponsive or cause your machine to crash. You have been warned.
If the card can deliver audio in a format Mumble can use, you will see a list of channels in the Unused section. Go through this list and find the channels that represent audio sent out of the card and move these to Speakers. On the Audigy 2 these are Mix L and Mix R. Use as few channels as you can, but make sure you have covered all the speakers. (Mix L / R are the composite of all the leftside and rightside speakers, so it is a good choice). Then, find a channel that represents your microphone and move that to Microphone. Many cards have both a Left and Right channel for microphone; just add one (they are identical).
Remember to select ASIO as your input interface under Basic Audio and then click OK.
Make sure no other applications are currently playing any audio. Open the Audio Statistics window; you should see values for both microphone, speaker and clean. Microphone should fluctuate quite a bit while speaker should be relatively steady between -96 and -80 dB. Scream loudly into the microphone. Microphone should now increase drastically, while speaker should not be affected at all. Play some music. This should cause loudspeaker to jump up drastically, and microphone should follow behind at a lower value. If either of these tests failed (it did not increase when this text said it should or the other way around), then your setup is misconfigured and you will send annoying echo to other players.
Please note; the echo canceler is very good, but it can not do miracles. If the audio level from your speakers is much louder than your voice, there will not be enough of the voice signal left in the input to send a clear signal.
