[What follows is technical, so close your eyes until you're done reading if you don't want to hear it]

Samsung phones had an extremely high minimum audio buffer size. The likely reason for this is to preserve battery. When you lower the buffer size, it requires more CPU interrupts to handle the audio. This means lower buffers results in faster battery drain. Unfortunately, Ventrilo servers with very low sample rates (8kHz and 11.025kHz) require extremely low buffer values. For example, Speex @8kHz quality 10 requires a 1920 byte buffer. If the minimum buffer is larger (which for Samsung it is), too much data gets buffered and the server rejects the audio packet.

The minimum buffer at 8kHz on a Samsung phone is 4160 bytes. Our solution to this is to record at the lowest available sample rate and then downsample the recording to the rate required by the Ventrilo protocol. Sadly, this will probably increase battery drain since downsampling is fairly CPU intensive. It is worth noting that if this problem is ever resolved on Samsung phones, Mangler will automatically detect it and this process won’t be necessary. On non-Samsung phones, this is not an issue.

[You can open your eyes now, the tech talk is over]

Mangler 1.0.2 is now released and it addresses this issue. You should be able to talk just fine on any server. If you do run into a problem, I am currently in possession of a Samsung phone and I am able to test.

As always, if you need support with a problem, please post in the forums using the link below rather than post in the comments of this post. Posts in the forums will notify our IRC channel. Comments on this blog post will not.

Binary versions of 1.2.2 are not currently available, but the source code can be downloaded from the Download page.

If you’re an Ubuntu user, you should start loudly complaining to the Ubuntu team to have Mangler included in the Ubuntu repositories. Going forward, we will not be supplying Debian packages.

New features since the last stable release (1.0.1) include:

• ALSA support
• OSSv4 support
• A new configuration file system. Your config file will be automatically migrated from ~/.manglerrc to a newly created directory of ~/.mangler
• The “send silenty” option is available for setting comments
• An on-screen display (overlay) is available
• Support for the celt codec (note that the Windows/Mac client will not be able to hear this)
• You can right click on the status icon to mute or quickly open the settings window
• You can adjust the master volume by using the mouse scroll wheel on the status icon
• The server ban list editor is available
• The server properties editor is available
• You can specify command line arguments to automatically connect to a server at startup
• Channel mute is supported
• User mute state is remembered
• Ability to record to VRF format (compatible with the Windows/Mac client)
• Some TTS notifications
• G15 Keyboard support (requires g15daemon to be running)
• User paging support
• Music player integration for Rhythmbox (show the currently playing song)
• Voice activation for transmit
• Support for setting a default channel at login. Right click on the channel and select “set default”
• Allow custom ALSA device names to be entered
• Fix clipping on amplification
• Added a VU meter to show outbound transmission signal strength
• Added a CLI jukebox client that will play MP3s to a channel and accept commands via global chat
• Channel editor, user editor, and rank editor is available for admins
• Ability to compile libventrilo3 on Apple platforms
• Added support for many admin functions in libventrilo3 (see the wiki for details)
• Master volume control
• Accessibility fixes for orca users
• Per-user volume settings are saved across restarts
• Channel passwords are saved across restarts
• New admin button to log in as a server admin
• Added an [ADMIN] flag if the user is logged in as a server admin
• Added an [A] channel flag if you’re an admin on a specific channel
• Admin users can drag/drop users into channels
• Admin users can kick and ban users via right-click menu
• Channel admins can move users between channels if they have appropriate access
• Rank tags are prepended to the user’s name in the channel list
• Users are now sorted alphabetically in the channel list
• Added ability to mute a specific user via the right-click menu
• Traffic statistics added to the server panel on the GUI
• Private chat is available
• Added Mute Mic and Mute Sound checkboxes to the main GUI window
• The Server Config is now split into tabs so it will be less cluttered
• Auto-reconnect on disconnect and kick
• Transmit button is now “sticky.” Pressing will toggle transmit.

• OSSv4 support!
• A new configuration file system. Your config file will be automatically migrated from ~/.manglerrc to a newly created directory of ~/.mangler
• The “send silenty” option is available for setting comments
• An on-screen display (overlay) is available
• Support for the celt codec (note that the Windows/Mac client will not be able to hear this)
• You can right click on the status icon to mute or quickly open the settings window
• You can adjust the master volume by using the mouse scroll wheel on the status icon
• The server ban list editor is available
• The server properties editor is available
• You can specify command line arguments to automatically connect to a server at startup
• Channel mute is supported
• User mute state is remembered
• Ability to record to VRF format (compatible with the Windows/Mac client)
• Some TTS notifications
• G15 Keyboard support (requires g15daemon to be running)
• User paging support
• Many new, exciting and mysterious bugs were added!

Thanks to Haxar, Bob Shaffer, humbaba, Daniel Sloof, cesium, Mesreth, Roman Tetelman, FWishbringer and everyone else that contributed code, donations, provided feedback, and helped test for bugs. Without the community, this project would not have been possible.

• Music player integration for Rhythmbox (show the currently playing song)
• Voice activation for transmit
• Support for setting a default channel at login. Right click on the channel and select “set default”
• Allow custom ALSA device names to be entered
• Fix clipping on amplification
• Added a VU meter to show outbound transmission signal strength
• Added a CLI jukebox client that will play MP3s to a channel and accept commands via global chat
• Channel editor, user editor, and rank editor is available for admins
• Many, many bugs were fixed
• Many, many bugs were created

While the list may seem short, these features required quite a bit of work. I’d like to thank Haxar, Bob Shaffer, and Felyza Wishbringer for their efforts.

Dan is still plugging away at the Android port, but there’s still no ETA. If you know a Java developer, he sure could use the help.

• Ability to compile libventrilo3 on Apple platforms
• Added support for many admin functions in libventrilo3 (see the wiki for details)
• Master volume control
• Accessibility fixes for orca users
• Per-user volume settings are saved across restarts
• Channel passwords are saved across restarts
• New admin button to log in as a server admin
• Added an [ADMIN] flag if the user is logged in as a server admin
• Added an [A] channel flag if you’re an admin on a specific channel
• Admin users can drag/drop users into channels
• Admin users can kick and ban users via right-click menu
• Channel admins can move users between channels if they have appropriate access
• Rank tags are prepended to the user’s name in the channel list
• Users are now sorted alphabetically in the channel list
• Added ability to mute a specific user via the right-click menu
• Traffic statistics added to the server panel on the GUI
• Private chat is available (work in progress… there’s some oddities on this one)
• Added Mute Mic and Mute Sound checkboxes to the main GUI window
• The Server Config is now split into tabs so it will be less cluttered
• Auto-reconnect on disconnect and kick
• Transmit button is now “sticky.” Pressing will toggle transmit.
• Last, but certainly not least, support for direct ALSA access for audio

• Removing/changing the mouse used for PTT no longer causes a crash
• The server options in the server list configuration are now honored (accept pages, allow recording, etc)

This release also fixes a number of documentation errors that were preventing inclusion in the Ubuntu repositories. This means Mangler is on track for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.04.

As always, our latest release can be downloaded from our download page. There is also an (incomplete) list of fixes and enhancements to be found on trac.

For the people that are wondering what is next:

• We will be working hard on our next version of Mangler which will bring several more enhancements and bugfixes. A release date for Mangler v1.1 will be announced in the near future.
• We have been experimenting with the Android platform and are successfully able to run our libventrilo3 library on top of an Android phone. Your feedback on this idea is always appreciated!

You may also be interested to know that we have (mostly) documented the libventrilo3 library. This should make it a lot easier for developers to build their custom software for the Ventrilo 3 protocol.

Last but not least, we would like to give credits to:

• All the people that reported bugs and made suggestions for improvements.
• Idlers in our IRC channels that gave us great company, feedback and debugging assistance.
• People involved in earlier research to the Ventrilo protocol, namely; the Spux Project and Luigi Auriemma. Mangler would not exist today if it wasn’t for these previous efforts.
• Package maintainers, designers, wiki editors, patch submitters, and anyone else that in any way contributed to Mangler!

Changes in RC4:

• Ability to copy comment and url to clipboard
• Hopefully fixed all temp bans on transmit. Please tell us if you’re still seeing these. We have only had a few reports of this problem, but I imagine this must have been widespread. If you’re getting banned from your server, we need to know about it.
• Do not attempt connections if we know required data is missing

We finally identified an unknown value that we’ve been searching for a couple months now. This behavior would not have affected anyone connecting to a personal server. It seems that the bug Luigi reported in the official Ventrilo client was fixed for the hosting companies’ version of the server.