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Ventrilo, the Internet‘s answer to the phone… perhaps except for Skype! So is it a bad idea to expect it on the iPhone? Probably. While it would be fun to have it on the iPhone, it would probably make the phone itself redundant, something that Apple probably wouldn’t be too happy about.
So, has anyone found anyway to get past this? Having a search around Google mostly brings up threads asking if the app exists or is in the making, but one person seems to have found a… sort of solution:
I just bought a new cell phone and I am sitting in a 3-month “Unlimited Local Talking”. Now I thought that it would be cool to be able to call a number and get linked into Ventrilo while you are out. Totally useless in my eyes as no one would ever use it except for this one moment that I wanted to use it. In thinking about that though, I got even more ideas which eventually lead me to develop (or think up) a portable Ventrilo Client.
1) I set up Ventrilo‘s speakers and microphone to my “Sound Blaster” card. I set my microphone to “What U Hear” so that any noise my computer made, was transmitted on the microphone channel.
2) I opened up Skype (as I have a $3.00 Unlimited Canada-US Calling Plan on it) and set the microphone also to the Sound Blaster’s “What U Hear” mode and the speakers to “Sound Blaster” (you can probably see where I’m going with this now).
3) I called my cell phone from Skype. When I spoke into my cell phone, it was sent to Skype, which then in turn sent it to Ventrilo so everyone can hear. Anytime someone talked on Ventrilo, Skype would pick up the noise as my microphone’s signal and send it to my cell phone allowing me to hear what was happening in Ventrilo.
Now the only problem that I was faced with was the ability to keep transmitting the signal. Taking off “Push To Talk” and leaving the sensitivity on did not produce any results as the program was canceling out its own sounds causing the “talk light” to never come on. So I had to use “Push To Talk” in order to transmit.
While it isn’t a hands on and easy app, it might give us some way to use Ventrilo on the iPhone. The problem is, it probably isn’t worth the trouble in the end. I was actually looking for something to hold me over instead of looking up free SIM cards, but this method may be a little too complicated for me 🙂
Overall, I wouldn’t expect this to appear as an official app any time soon, and I imagine that if it was made as a jail-broken app, Apple would probably take a much, much stronger stance against it.
Everyday Banter 