Voice chat stuff

To enhance our production of fail, a voice chat experiment is in progress. Mumble is the current delivery system.

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/

Connect to voice.wobble.in (or voice.gentoo-pr0n.org), default port.

1. emerge mumble
2. bitch about qt (optional)
3. go through mumble audio wizard. don't fail.
4. connect to mumble server at voice.wobble.in (also aliased at voice.gentoo-pr0n.org)
5. get a mic
6. speak into your mic
7. ???
8. tacos

If you get jitter/stutter sometimes when a person talks, run mumble from a terminal and see if you get an error message like "ALSAAudio: Non-critical: w=snd_pcm_writei(pcm_handle, outbuff, period_size): Broken pipe" when it happens.

If so, you need to increase the output buffer size in mumble. The problem is that various kernel preemption and multitasking can cause mumble to not read out the entire buffer in the given amount of time. This is especially the case with USB headsets, which adds all the USB stack's preemption points.

Came to this conclusion after reading the babbling at http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/HowTo_Asynchronous_Playback

Ken69267's ~/.asoundrc for his USB headset hax

# asym per default
pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "asymer"
}

# for the aoss script
pcm.dsp0 {
    type plug
    slave.pcm "asymer"
}

# asym plugin magic
pcm.asymer {
    type asym
    playback.pcm "dmix"
    capture.pcm "dsnoop"
}

# playback channel
pcm.dmixer  {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    slave {
        pcm "hw:0,0"
        #periods 128
     #   rate 44100
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

# record channel
pcm.dsnooper  {
    type dsnoop
    ipc_key 1024
    slave {
        card 0
    #periods 128
       # rate 44100
    }
    bindings {
        0 0
        1 1
    }
}

# sound mixer
ctl.mixer0 {
    type hw
    card 0
}

Don't go there… because:

1. ALSA doesn't create namehints for bluetooth audio, which means Mumble gets pissy
2. Most Headset/Handsfree devices are 8000 Hz, but Mumble needs 16000 Hz (A2DP headsets might work, but you'll probably die of frustration with the above plus lack of ALSA/BlueZ docs)