Teamspeak for the Mac

http://www.savvy.nl/blog/download/

It's a beta version, but I thought it would be something we would be interested in and could use in Second Life.

I'm at work now, I read about it on Avantgo on my iPaq on the bus on the way in. So I can't try it until I get on my Powerbook. But I would love to see if anyone could try it and see how it works. This was one piece of software we were lacking. More and more software is being ported to the Mac, eventually no one will be able to say "it's not availabel on the Mac".

In what ways is teamspeak more suitable than Skype, which performs superbly for me ?

Anyway, I wouldn't use any voice communication except when working alone with RL acquaintances, unless very heavily disguisable. Or better still, synthetically generated from speech recognition, so that I can design my voice as readily as a shirt, to fit my avatar of the day.

Otherwise we'll have to temper our imaginations on the avatar front, or else keep meeting the most horrid jarring mismatches, completely breaking immersion.

Not to mention the increase in ghettoisation which would occur with regional and social groupings, races, and nationalities beginning to separate from each other, if only for better mutual comprehension, but probably for worse reasons of prejudice and group stereotyping.

I say - keep it out until we have really top class voice design, with synthetic phrasing to destroy and replace even the rhythms of speech, so indicative of origin and upbringing. Key targets for antipathy and discrimination.

At the moment "you are what you type". Another form of discrimination, I know, but at least you can do something about it without screwing with your whole personality.

OR is voice communication already in heavy use in SL? I've never been aware of it, but maybe I wouldn't know. I've used Skype when building with an RL pal, but in that case there is no anonymity to break. Does it go on much in casual meetings between strangers ?

I believe ventrillo is also available for mac now, after a long time of being "in development"

and Ellie, I can't speak about TeamSpeak, but Ventrillo is superior to skype for voice communication, I've found. The servers support conference calls of over 5 people, and it hogs FAR less system resources than skype does. I am forced to use the beta mac skype client in order to have some of the capabilities necessary to chat wtih some of my friends, and I have the problem with it dropping calls constantly, and crashing.

I am currently using a P2 400 running windows 2000 (yes, I know, I'm a traitor) because my PowerBook G4 is in for service. I've run skype on here, and when skype is running, I am unable to run anything else. With ventrillo running, I can run everything I normally do. It is a system resource meiser compared to skype.

just my two coppers.

CCC

Something wrong there, Clinton. I leave skype running almost all the time, with tiny impact on system resources. Even with SL sometimes - not detectably slowed.