Case in point, have you ever had someone login to your Ventrilo Server and have their microphone volume up so high that it? Well, this is something that you can remedy without having to be an admin on the Ventrilo server. You can actually raise or lower the volume of anyone in the server as you see fit! How do you do this, you ask? Well, Let me show you.

1. Right-click on a person’s name within your Ventrilo client then goto “Miscellaneous” and click on “Special Effect”

2. A new window will pop up with a list of special effect on the right. Highlight “Volume” on the right.

3. Click the “Add” button in the middle of the window.

4. A menu will pop up asking you to adjust the volume to your desired level. Simply drag the slider to the setting you wish then click “Ok”

5. Click “Ok” again to close out of the special effects window and your changes have been applied.

This setting will only affect how you here the people which you have modified. Other people in Ventrilo will still hear them normally. Like wise you can go back into the special effects menu and go into the properties of the “Volume” effect and adjust their volume again at anytime or remove it entirely.

This little tactic comes in handy for people who won’t reduce their microphone volume or are just having too much trouble figuring out how to change it on their home computer. I can vouch from personal experience that this has saved me from a lot of stress on many occasion. I hope it is just as useful for you!

In this article we will set Mumble aside for now as it won’t be a real contender until they release they release the v2.0 of their software (which should be coming soon!). Instead we will be dealing with the two most popular choices: Ventrilo and Teamspeak.

So what are the main differences between Teamspeak Server Hosting and Ventrilo Server Hosting you ask? Well, without getting into specifics, I’ll lay out their major points below:

Teamspeak Hosting:
- Voice quality is not the greatest, but it is pretty good and often alot better than the voice service that is built-in to many games, such as Counter-Strike: Source or World of Warcraft.

- Easy to use for both it’s clients and it’s administrators.

- Easy to configure for it’s administrators. Administrative options are very basic for Teamspeak with minimal computer experience to operate and configure.

Ventrilo Hosting:
- Voice quality is very clean and clear.

- Moderately simple to use for it’s clients, but administrating a Ventrilo server requires quite a bit more fiddling and a moderate amount of computer experience to use.

- Configuring a Ventrilo Server is a bit more difficult than Teamspeak, but the voice quality is often worth it to many individuals. Luckily it has a good learning curve, so once you take the time to play with all of Ventrilo’s various administrative features, it’s pretty easy from there on out.

Aside from these major points, both Teamspeak Servers and Ventrilo Servers are relatively the same. Both require very little computer power to run and don’t require a fast internet speed to operate properly. Both are also fairly small and easy to install.

This information should help you pick the right brand voice service for you and your fellow members’ needs if you are having trouble making a decision. Also, it never hurts to ask your members if they have a preference of voice software. With all of this mind, if you still find yourself having trouble making a decision, then that’s when it’s time to flip a coin, as at that point either decision you make is going to be a good one.

Setting a global password on the server:
Edit the murmur.ini file (which is located in the Default Config Files section of your server’s web control panel) and place the desired password at the end of the”serverpassword=” entry. Save the file and restart your server for the change to take effect.

Adding an administrator or other users:
This functionality has not yet been implemented, but is slated for the v1.2.0 releases of the Murmur & Mumble voice chat software (which hopefully will be fairly soon). You can see a list of all the functions that are to be added in the upcoming version by visiting their “Upcoming Features” page at the link below:

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Upcoming

Logging in as the server’s SuperUser:
If you want full admin access to the server then you need to login with the username “SuperUser” and the password that you have set in the superadmin.txt file (which is located in the Default Config Files section of your server’s web control panel). The login is case-sensitive so make sure that you capitalize both the letters S and U in the username SuperUser when logging in. The SuperUser account is currently the only one with access to create channels, kick, ban, etc. Also, note that the SuperUser account cannot speak. If you wish to be able to speak then you need to login under a different username.

Setting a global password on the server:
Edit the murmur.ini file (which is located in the Default Config Files section of your server’s web control panel) and place the desired password at the end of the”serverpassword=” entry. Save the file and restart your server for the change to take effect.

Adding an administrator or other users:
This functionality has not yet been implemented, but is slated for the v1.2.0 releases of the Murmur & Mumble voice chat software (which hopefully will be fairly soon). You can see a list of all the functions that are to be added in the upcoming version by visiting their “Upcoming Features” page at the link below:

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/Upcoming

When you first open the Mumble voice client you will see a window labeled “Mumble Server Connect”. Click on the “Custom Servers” tab at the top of this window and click on the button labeled “New”. You will than want to fill in the following blanks:

Label - This is simply a name for this server entry on your home computer. The label can be anything you like, such as “Bob’s Server” and has no effect on how you connect.

Address - This is the server’s IP address (or hostname if it has one).

Port - This is the port number of the server that you are wanting to connect to.

Username - This is the name that will be visible to others when you login to the voice server. This can be anything that you want. The only restriction being that it is not a username that is already in use by someone else on the server.

Password - This is the password used to login to the server. By default you will simply leave this blank. If the voice server admin created a global password that you need to login to their server then you will type that password in here.

You will then want to click on the “Add” button at the bottom of the window once all the above information has been filled in. This will add this entry to your Custom Servers list so that you can connect to it at anytime simply by selecting it on the left and then clicking on the “Connect” button at the bottom of the window. You will now connect to your Mumble server.

Channels help separate the individuals on your server into different areas of your server so that multiple people can have their own separate conversations going on within the same Ventrilo server without interrupting one another.

However, new admins often experience problems when they try to create a channel for the first time on their own Ventrilo servers. This is largely in-part to the default settings that come with your Ventrilo client when you first install it to your home computer. Follow these simple steps and you should be able to avoid this fateful annoyance when creating your first channel.

1) Open your Ventrilo client on your computer.

2) Connect to your Ventrilo server and be sure to login with admin privileges.

3) Right-click on the server title in your Ventrilo window to bring up your options menu like so:

4) Now move your mouse cursor down to “Channel Admin” and select “Create”.

5) Make sure that you have all of the boxes checked/unchecked as indicated in the image below and click “OK”.

…and you’re done! You now have a brand new, fully functional channel to use on your server. Furthermore, you can go back to edit these channel settings, at anytime you wish, simply by right-clicking on the channel name in your Ventrilo client window and selecting the “Channel Admin > Edit” option. Feel free to experiment with the various check-boxes and password settings at your leisure knowing that, if you check something and the channel stops working, you can always get it working again by simply matching your channel settings back to the picture above.

2) Connect to your Ventrilo server and be sure to login with admin privileges.

3) Right-click on a blank space within your Ventrilo client.

4) Navigate to “Server Admin” and then select “Server Properties”

5) Now take note of the options in the top right-hand corner of this screen labeled “User Inactivity”:

This is where you set how many minutes of inactivity before the server marks the user as AFK and also where you choose to have them moved to a channel or simply kicked from the server (kicking a player does not ban them in any form so they can simply reconnect if needed when they get back to their computer).

Change these settings to match your desires then click on the “Send”
button at the bottom of the page and you are done! It’s a simple as that.

Place your cursor in the “Target:” box then add a space and the a -m after the quotation at the end of the line like so:

After

Once you have made this change, click the “OK” button at the bottom of the screen and you’re done.

Now you can open as many instances of the Ventrilo client as you want by clicking on your newly edited shortcut and be logged into as many Ventrilo servers at the same time as your multi-tasking brain can handle! You can further configure different hotkey settings for each Ventrilo server that you connect to so that you can have a different push-to-talk key for each server.

This one certainly sounds like they’re in the wrong - why isn’t the server replying to you?  You have to remember that while these error messages are true, they don’t always mean what you think: “no reply from server” could mean that the server isn’t there at all, or it’s running an SMTP database, or it’s underneath four meters of water and can’t really deal with your audio-exchange request right now.

The most common cause of this problem is the simple typo which leaves your client looking in the wrong place for the right server.  Another is that the teamspeak server you’re looking for isn’t there anymore.  Smaller servers, especially clan voicechat servers, may flicker on and off depending on whether they can pay for them that month.

“Got a bad response from server”

How dare the server give you a bad response!  But this isn’t the server being rude, or rather, not being any ruder than a bouncer normally is when you try to get into a club wearing the wrong clothes.  This response means that you’re using one version of teamspeak, the server is using another, and never the twain shall meet.  If you’ve just installed the software you’re likely using RC2, meaning that this address must be the antiquated RC1 version. Solution?  Go somewhere that isn’t using stone-age voicechat technology.

“Codec not supported”

Another case of concise but unclear wording obscuring the meaning.  It could be interpreted as the server’s inability to support your audio codec, one among many options, but the fact is it’ll be because your codecs are out of date.  You’re trying to connect to a modern communications net by bashing your stone-ax and lionskin loincloth against them and the server is having none of it.  Leave, update your codecs and drivers, and come back.

“Error Getting List”

You’re looking for a new place to play, but when you click on the web server list you don’t get a list.  You get an error.  An “error getting list”, so to speak.

This one genuinely isn’t your fault.  Your poor little desktop program can’t find the list because there’s no list to find - something has gone wrong at Teamspeak central and you’ll just have to wait until they can fix it.  It normally doesn’t take long, though in the meantime you may be forced to extreme measures like “talking to people in real life.”

Random Reboots

When using Teamspeak your desktop reboots itself at random.  To say that this is mildly frustrating is like saying a thermonuclear explosion in a volcano is a bit hot - especially since it has a tendency to leave your Frigate unmanned and unpowered with enemy raiders coming in (or whatever).

This, also, really isn’t your fault.  Microsoft were good to their word of “no more bluescreens of death” promise with Windows XP, but in a doublespeak manner of which the finest political spin doctor would be proud.  When Windows feels it might end up in a BSOD it automatically reboots the system - rather than “generating an error message” or “telling the user what’s actually going on.”

To fix this go into Settings in your Control Panel and click “System/Advanced/System and Recovery/Settings” and in “System Failure” uncheck the “Automatically Restart” checkbox.