Features

VoiceChatter is still under heavy development, but the feature set is large enough to be useful in the general case. So just because a feature isn't listed doesn't mean that it won't be integrated soon.

Currently, VoiceChatter implements the following features:

  • Talk with friends, family, or teammates over a fast and clear connection
  • Ability to use text chat for anyone without a microphone
  • Native client and server support for all 3 major platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux)
  • Automatic microphone volume normalization
  • Admin features including kick/ban and move clients
  • Ability to define users and groups for granting admin privileges
  • Remote admin interface, allowing 3rd party applications to admin servers while they are running
  • Recording voice conversations
  • Saved server list for easily managing any servers that you use
  • Password protected servers and channels
  • Nested channels
  • Codec quality/bandwidth usage control
  • Support for ALSA, OSS, Windows MME, DirectSound, and CoreAudio
  • Voice activated transmission
  • User comments
  • Text to speech and/or audio file event notifications
  • Private (user to user) messaging
  • Talk in more than one channel at the same time

There are plans to integrate the following in the near future:

  • Logging of text conversations
  • User to user file transfers

The Technical Info

VoiceChatter uses UDP for communication for the fastest possible communication. This is why VoiceChatter is able to provide such low latency for voice communication. It also makes the network code a lot simpler and more efficient.

If someone is dropping a lot of voice packets, they are simply dropped rather than guaranteed to be played at some later time. This also means that there are no more "recaps" of conversations long over like in other voice communication software.

Only free, open source, and cross-platform libraries were used, so as long as the libraries support a platform, it is just a matter of compiling VoiceChatter on that platform to get it running. Speaking of which, I really need a mac developer to create the mac ports of VoiceChatter. See the Contribute page for details.