Friday Freebies update from October 2005

This week's Friday Freebies are all about VoIP, as Don and I have spent some time this week checking out alternatives to Skype due to its limitations on conferencing in friends. The first free VoIP tool we tried was Ventrilo. Runs on Linux, client on Windows, easy to set up and run. Some tooling around the net tells me that a lot of gamers are using Ventrilo and claim the voice quality is better than that of our second Friday Freebie, but even on our internal network we had some issues getting it to sound good. Now, we're not using headsets and needed a solution that would handle use of an external mic and speakers, and from what I've read in forum posts around the net about Ventrilo this is probably the cause of our particular problems. The second Friday Freebie is TeamSpeak and it is also used by a ton of gamers. Also runs on Linux/Windows and has clients for both operating systems. I set up the server on Linux for a quick test and we've been playing with it ever since, having friends from around the country call in and test it out. Again, headsets are what this proggy was designed for, and with an open mic and speakers we're hearing feedback and echoes that we just don't get with Skype in a similar configuration, but we've been able to work around that a bit by strategically placing the mic behind a box of Cheese Nips. Really. The only problem with TeamSpeak appears to be getting the client. It doesn't download properly off the TeamSpeak site, nor off about a hundred different servers I tried - just this one.Both apps are free, and both overcome the 5 person conference limitation of Skype, so check 'em out if you're in need of a voice chat app that lets you conference in more than 4 friends or family.