Teamspeak Howto: Beta & Stable client at the same time

When a Teamspeak beta client is released, I commonly see users having an issue commenting they'll "downgrade" to stable. That's not really necessary, and can, e.g. in case of settings incompability, potentially cause problems. Plus, a downgrading and upgrading via reinstalling the client isn't really that comfortable.

So, if you're eager to check out a beta, but want to keep stable as an alternative, here's what I do. I just have two "installations".

Teamspeak rarely uses the registry, most notably is the use of associating plugin installation files with the package installer. Your settings, based on your choice on installation, is either in a) your Teamspeak folder (causing you trouble with UAC if that's in a standard installation path), or at b) %APPDATA%\TS3Client. The client simply uses the search order of "if there's no a) look at b)".

We can utilize that to have two installations with either the same, or independent settings.

You start off having the stable client. Instead of doing the beta upgrade to that, you copy the Teamspeak folder to a different place. If you want independent settings, which I'd generally recommend, make sure the target is outside of the reign of UAC, outside of program files, like C:\TeamspeakBeta. That's because for independent settings we want to have them in TeamspeakBeta\config. Settings want to change, hence trouble with UAC.

Independent settings: Copy your stable client's settings to TeamspeakBeta\config. If you have it in a), it's that simple. If you have it in b), you just copy the %APPDATA%\TS3Client folder to TeamspeakBeta and rename it to config.

Now, upgrade your client in TeamspeakBeta to the beta channel via the usual procedure. Go to the TeamspeakBeta folder and create a file named "update.ini" with this content:

[Channel]
beta=true

Create a shortcut to the beta .exe for convenience.

You're finished, you can now start either the beta or the stable client without up- and downgrading all the time.

The thing to watch out for now is if you install a plugin that's aimed for the beta, you need to manually point the package installer to the location of the beta client, since the windows registry knows only about the stable.