First, a explaination (skip ahead if you don't care ;) --- So, we're a gang of developers in a small soon-to-be-established company and we've used Ventrilo for quite a while to have meetings over the Internet (good solution considered we're spread all over Sweden). Now, our problem is that the ventrilo guys have recently (dont know exactly when it happened) become greedy/less generous (no debate about this please) and limited the maximum number of users in a server to 8 people. This was, as we noticed, not enough to let us all be in the server and the alternative is not paying a few dollars for a registration; you actually need to _rent_ a server if you want more slots! That wont work because our budget is thin and we don't have that large meetings more than once in a month or so. --- So, does anyone know of any _stable_ voice communication programs that enables a reasonably good voice quality and semi-permanent conference sessions and the possibility to have larger conferences for ~12 users or so? Of course, free is king but we could manage a reasonable one-time charge if the software is good enough. Thanks for any help; and yes, I've done my Googling but I'd prefer to hear about personal experience with the programs.

Is there any reason why you can't use the old software?

I think it's illegal to use old versions of Ventrilo (seems odd, but that's what I understand from the new license), so that's out of the question. Besides, IIRC there's quite alot of bugs/annoyances in the old versions..

I tried Teamspeak2; very nice but it seems like it's impossible to increase the voice quality to any reasonable level.. Can't communicate very well when everyone sounds like robots :P Seems like they're going to fix that in a new version though, so that might be an alternative.

Thanks for the replies so far.

Quote:I think it's illegal to use old versions of Ventrilo (seems odd, but that's what I understand from the new license), so that's out of the question.

I'm hardly a lawyer, but are you under the old or new license? It would make sense that if you are under the old license you could continue to use the old program. Again, I'm not a lawyer so I may be wrong.

Quote:Original post by Lord Maz
I think it's illegal to use old versions of Ventrilo (seems odd, but that's what I understand from the new license[...]

Perhaps, but if you're using the old version, you haven't agreed to the new contract. I'm not a lawyer, but I think phrases like 'we can change the contract whenever we want and you agree to the new contract too' are illegal (in the US) and would make the whole contract void.

Having said that, I also used ventrilo back in the days before the free version was limited, and I looked around for free alternatives and found none that compared.
I now have a 20 slot ventrilo server hosted with DarkStar(if you don't mind me as a referer, use this link instead) and I've had a good experience with them so far. It's not inexpensive (I pay more for ventrilo hosting than I do for web hosting), but it's not really expensive either if you have any income to spare.