Have you ever heard about Mumble? It is an open-source low latency chat software, primarily aimed to gamers. I gave it a try lately and was really impressed by the audio quality.
So much that I now use it way more often than “traditional“ Voice over IP softwares such as Skype or Hangout!

But there is a catch… You have to agree with your friends on a public server to join. There, every other people who may join can participate to your conversation… It’s an audio version of the old public chat-rooms you may have used 15 years ago!

Fortunately, it is possible to host his own server and make it private. My always on Raspberry Pi, which is mainly used as a BitTorrent Sync server, is the perfect device for the job!

First, download and install the mumble-server package.

apt-get install mumble-server  
dpkg-reconfigure mumble-server

It will of course work on Raspbian, but also on Moebius, the very light and headless derivative running on my Pi.

You can now edit the configuration file:

nano /etc/mumble-server.ini

You can now configure a required password to join the server, or change the UDP and TCP port listening. By default, it is 64738. Make sure it can be reached from the Internet 😉
By the way, if you want to generate a random password, give a try to my password generator 🙂

Once done, restart the daemon.

/etc/init.d/mumble-server restart

You can now privately chat with your friends! Enjoy 😉