Garry's Mod Voice Chat on a Dedicated Server
Voice on a GMod server is decided in three places, and almost every "voice chat not working" report is really a question about which one. The server decides whether voice exists at all and who is allowed to hear whom. The gamemode narrows that down per round and per team. The individual client decides whether a microphone is actually being captured and sent. Fixing the wrong layer is why people change sv_alltalk for an hour and nothing improves.
Last verified: September 17, 2026. The September 2026 update, live on September 16, shipped 64-bit binaries on Windows. It is not a voice change. Do not expect it to fix or to break a voice problem, and do not roll a server back because voice broke on the same week.
The two server convars answer different questions
These two get confused constantly because both contain the word "voice" in people's heads. They are not alternatives to each other. You normally want both set, and you set them for different reasons.
| Convar | Question it answers | Set to 1 | Set to 0 |
|---|---|---|---|
sv_voiceenable | Does in-game voice work on this server at all? | Voice is available. This is the normal state. | Nobody can transmit. Every microphone on the server goes dead at once, regardless of gamemode or team. |
sv_alltalk | Who hears whom? | Everyone hears everyone, across teams and across the living and the dead. | The gamemode's own rules apply, which usually means teammates only and the dead kept out of the living channel. |
A useful way to hold it: sv_voiceenable is the power switch, sv_alltalk is the routing. Turning the routing off does not turn voice off, and turning voice on does not decide who ends up in your ears.
The sv_alltalk setting each gamemode wants
There is no correct global value. The right answer depends on whether your gamemode has something to hide. If information is secret, all-talk leaks it. If nothing is secret, all-talk is simply friendlier.
| Gamemode | sv_alltalk | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Sandbox | 1 (on) | No teams, no rounds, nothing to conceal. A group of friends building together wants one shared channel, and splitting it just makes people ask why they cannot hear each other. |
| Trouble in Terrorist Town | 0 (off) | A hidden-role puzzle. A dead player knows who the traitor is, and with all-talk on they will say so, deliberately or not. It ends rounds early every time. |
| DarkRP | 0 (off) | Roleplay depends on proximity. Voice that carries across the map removes the reason to walk anywhere. Let the gamemode and its addons handle local and radio voice. |
| Prop Hunt | 0 (off) | Hunters and props are opposing teams, and props are trying not to be found. Cross-team voice hands away hiding spots, sometimes when someone just laughs. |
If you run several gamemodes on one machine, set this per gamemode rather than once and forget it. See gamemodes for how the selection works at boot.
Setting them
Put both in garrysmod/cfg/server.cfg alongside the rest of your persistent settings. These are the defaults we apply to a new Garry's Mod server on our platform:
hostname "My GMod Server"
sv_voiceenable 1
sv_alltalk 1
sv_lan 0
sv_cheats 0
Timing matters more than the values. server.cfg is read when a map loads, so a value you type into the console applies immediately but is gone on the next restart, and a value you add to the file does nothing until the server restarts or changes level. Change one, then do the other, or you will end up testing a setting that was never live. The full startup-flag versus server.cfg split, plus sv_password, rcon_password, maxplayers, sv_pure and host_workshop_collection, is covered in server configuration.
Diagnostic ladder: voice chat not working
Start at the symptom, not at the convar. The shape of the failure tells you the layer before you touch anything.
| Symptom | Layer | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Nobody on the server can hear anyone, including players whose microphones worked yesterday | Server | sv_voiceenable is 0, or a gamemode or addon is blocking every pair. Read the convar's current value in the console before changing files. |
| Everyone works except one or two specific players | Those clients | Wrong input device, push to talk not bound or bound to a key the game never receives, or the operating system blocking microphone access. Nothing on the server will fix this. |
| A player hears everyone but is never heard | That client, outbound | Capture device and input level first. Garry's Mod also asks a player to grant microphone permission for the server they joined, and that grant can be revoked later. A revoked or never-answered prompt looks exactly like a broken microphone. |
| A player is heard fine but hears nobody | That client, inbound | Output device and voice volume. Also check for a local mute: the base game's mute is per listener and lives on that machine, so it survives rejoining and is invisible to you. |
| Voice is choppy, robotic, delayed, or cuts out mid-sentence | Network | Not a configuration problem. Voice rides the same connection as the game, so this is packet loss, distance, or a loaded server. Check whether movement is bad at the same moments. |
| Dead players are audible when they should not be | Server or gamemode | sv_alltalk is 1, or the gamemode is not filtering. Set it to 0 and reload before assuming the gamemode is broken. |
| Voice fades with distance and only carries a short range | Working as designed | Three-dimensional voice fades with distance and plays in stereo. Report it as a setting, not a fault. |
Below the convars, the server-side hook GM:PlayerCanHearPlayersVoice has the final say for every listener and talker pair, and it is what gamemodes and admin mods actually hook into. Facepunch notes that it runs listeners times talkers every 0.3 seconds while anyone is speaking, so a slow custom implementation is a real performance cost on a full server. If voice behaves in a way no convar explains, look for a gamemode or addon that overrides this hook.
Mute and gag are an admin mod feature
The base game gives a player the ability to mute someone for themselves. It does not give an operator a way to silence a person for the whole server. That control comes from an admin mod, which is the layer that turns "this person is shouting slurs" into a command you can run from in-game or over RCON.
- Local mute is per listener and client-side. One player muting a troll protects only that player.
- Server-side silencing needs an admin mod. Most of them split voice and text into two separate commands, commonly named mute and gag, but which word covers which channel differs between mods. Read your mod's own command list rather than assuming.
- Give the commands to trusted staff only, and keep RCON credentials separate from anything you paste in chat. See admin commands.
Voice quality is a performance problem
Voice is not a side channel. It travels over the same connection as movement, physics and Lua, which means a server that is struggling is also a server where people sound underwater. If voice degrades at the same time as gameplay, stop tuning voice settings and look at tick budget, addon cost and player count instead. Performance and lag covers what to measure, and connection troubleshooting covers the join-side version of the same problem.
When out-of-game voice is the better answer
Plenty of established communities barely use in-game voice, and that is a choice rather than a failure. An external voice platform gives you channels that survive a map change, moderation that outlives a session, and somewhere to talk while the server restarts. In-game voice wins where position matters, since proximity and team routing are things an external service cannot know about. A sensible split is in-game voice for anything that depends on where you are standing, and an external channel for everything organisational.
Related Garry's Mod guides
- Startup flags and server.cfg
- Choosing and switching gamemodes
- Admin mods and staff permissions
- Admin commands and RCON safety
- Performance and lag
- Connection troubleshooting
- Dedicated-server setup
Want these defaults applied for you, with a config you can edit and a server close enough to your players that voice stays clean? Launch managed Garry's Mod hosting and pick the region nearest your community.