Searching for the Mute Button
Because I’ve been needing to use a Windows-based PC the past couple of days, I have no room at the desk of my Windows-based PC, and I’ve been meaning to play with them, I’ve been mucking about with VoIP soft phones. Specifically, ones I can attach to my Asterisk server.
The first one I tried was Pulver Communicator, which uses a rather obtuse “unlocking” procedure to allow you to program it to use an arbitrary SIP proxy. It’s kind of cool because the client also serves as an IM client for MSN, AIM, Yahoo, and ICQ. It will even tie onto Skype as well. The SIP client is servicable. The major issue: when I hit the mute button, within a minute or so, the call hangs up. Likely a bug.
Seeing as I have an Asterisk server at home, I tried a number of different IAX soft clients. After trying a number of clients, I ended up settling on diax. Diax has a really crappy interface, but it has one thing that almost any other IAX client lacks: a mute button. When you are on conference calls as often as I am, a mute button is an absolute requirement. On the plus side, the audio quality on diax was excellent, at least according to a co-worker I spent two hours on the phone with today.
