Frequently asked questions

Muxvox turns the phones in a room into wireless microphones and speakers for the computer that's in the meeting. All the phones are mixed together behind one virtual audio device, which you select in your meeting app just like any headset. Everyone near a phone is heard clearly, and the far end comes back out through the phones — or through a room speaker.

No. That's the point. The meeting app sees the desktop as one participant. Connected phones are not separate tiles, identities or callers — they're microphones and speakers for that one participant.

Any app that lets you choose an audio input and output device: Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack huddles, Discord, FaceTime — and equally OBS, audio recorders, or anything else that talks to a microphone. Muxvox appears to the system as a normal audio device, so there's no per-app integration.

Headphones are the gold standard, but often not necessary. On iPhone, echo cancellation is built in and always on (Apple's voice processing); on Android there's an echo-cancellation toggle in Settings. Both let a phone use its loudspeaker without feeding itself back into the meeting. Phones can also join as microphone-only, which sidesteps the question entirely when a room speaker carries the far end.

Nine times out of ten this is the Wi-Fi network, not Muxvox. Many office and guest networks enable “client isolation”, which stops devices on the same network from seeing each other — discovery finds nothing and connections fail, even though both devices are online. First check both devices are on the same network (not one on guest Wi-Fi). If discovery still finds nothing, connect by address: Muxvox Desktop shows its address, and the phone accepts it under Settings → Connect by address. If the network blocks even that, a phone hotspot with the Mac joined to it works as a room network in a pinch.

Devices must be able to reach each other on the local network: Muxvox uses UDP port 7443 for encrypted audio, and Bonjour/mDNS for discovery (with connect-by-address as the fallback when multicast is blocked). No inbound connections from the internet are needed, and no audio ever leaves your network. On managed corporate Wi-Fi, ask IT to allow device-to-device traffic on the meeting-room SSID.

Mark them as being in the same room in the desktop app. Muxvox then keeps those phones out of each other's mix, which prevents the feedback howl you'd otherwise get when one phone's speaker reaches another phone's microphone. An automatic mixer balances the levels between the people speaking.

No. Audio travels directly between the phones and the desktop over your own local Wi-Fi network, encrypted with DTLS. There is no Muxvox cloud in the audio path, no account to create, and nothing leaves your network except what your meeting app itself sends.

Low enough for live conversation is the goal, and everything in the pipeline is built for it: a purpose-built UDP transport, the Opus codec, drift-corrected mixing and an adaptive jitter buffer. We don't publish a latency number yet, because we haven't finished measuring one end-to-end on real hardware — and we'd rather quote nothing than quote a number we can't stand behind. A measured figure will be published here when we have it.

Use Check the room: the desktop plays a short chirp through the room speaker and reports which phones heard it. A phone that's muted, set to microphone-only, or too far away shows up in that report — before the meeting starts, not ten minutes into it.

No. The virtual audio device ships inside Muxvox Desktop and installs with one click from the app. macOS asks you to approve the installation once.

Desktop: macOS today; Windows is planned. Phones: iPhone on the App Store, Android on Google Play. See the download page for all of them in one place.

If you want. Phones can be accepted automatically with a setting that is off by default and says plainly what it admits. For most rooms we recommend leaving it off: approving a phone takes one tap, and approvals persist, so regulars reconnect without asking again.

Personal is free forever: one desktop, up to two phones per session, all core audio features — no account, no card. Team is $14 per desktop per month or $140 per year and adds up to 16 phones per session, rooms and room speaker, Check the room, remembered approvals and guest mode. That's a room of up to 16 people with individual microphones for $140 a year — where dedicated conference systems run from hundreds to thousands of dollars before installation. You can try Team free for 3 days from inside the desktop app — no card needed. Details on the pricing page.

The Mac running Muxvox Desktop — one seat per Mac, adjustable on one subscription. The phones that connect to it are free, for everyone, always: there are no per-participant fees, no per-minute metering, and nobody joining a room ever needs to pay or sign up for anything.

Meetings never depend on our servers: audio is entirely local, and the app checks its license in the background with at least a week of offline grace, so an internet or billing outage can't interrupt a call. If a subscription actually ends, Muxvox returns to the free Personal plan at the next session — your rooms, approvals and settings are kept, not deleted, and come back if you resubscribe. A plan change never disconnects a running meeting.

Muxvox is a product of Mountaineers Holding B.V., based in the Netherlands.