21–30 of 31 posts
I've used JamKazam ( https://www.jamkazam.com ) a few times recently to play folk music with some friends. The sort of music we play relies very heavily on listening to each other and improvising, and surprisingly it _just about_ works on JamKazam. It's certainly not perfect, but we're not going to be hanging out in pubs together any time soon. The important number is round-trip latency, and we found that around 25ms…
I know of a musician who has been performing online shows for the past couple of months. He does them solo, just singing and playing guitar. He streams video using OBS Studio and Crowdcast.io, and all of us attending the show participate through text chat. His video has a latency of about 30 seconds, presumably because it's using a typical RTMP + CDN setup, designed for non-interactive broadcasts. So sometimes after…
I don't know at what point the scaling breaks down.
Any amount of latency seems like too much latency when jamming with others. I could see how this would work with audio engines like SuperCollider, but I'm curious how one goes about this for live recordings.
Latency is kind of funny in the context of jamming. Sound only travels about a foot per millisecond. An orchestra pit is thirty or forty feet across. A big festival stage can be thirty feet across. So we have these pretty ordinary situations where there's about thirty milliseconds of latency between when a drumstick strikes a head and a guitar player hears it. Of course, in a modern live pop performance there's all t…
But even with zero auditory latency, musicians (classical musicians at least) don't really use sound to synchronize, because the cue must come before the sound is made.
That's why in any competent orchestra, musicians rely on visual synchronization. For example, the string sections look at the concert master, who in turn communicate with the conductor and the soloist.
In chamber music, the musicians constantly look, nod, and body gesture at each other to synchronize.
The internet is competing with light not sound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, I clicked on the learn more link for the jamblaster and it’s a dead link?
wince We need to take that section/link down. We did do a KickStarter for the JamBlaster, made ~200 and shipped them. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1091884999/jamblaster-t... But we are not in a position to be focusing on custom hardware. ... a dedicated device is half the puzzle. That, and a low-latency network connection to your peers. You have those two and you can get a reliable experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Latency is kind of funny in the context of jamming. Sound only travels about a foot per millisecond. An orchestra pit is thirty or forty feet across. A big festival stage can be thirty feet across. So we have these pretty ordinary situations where there's about thirty milliseconds of latency between when a drumstick strikes a head and a guitar player hears it. Of course, in a modern live pop performance there's all t…
Reminds me of a marching band of a college. The drums and the brass section would gradually dis-synchronize, the sound disintegrated into chaos, until the conductor couldn't stand it and shouted at everyone. My guess is that the players weren't paying attention to the conductor at all. But even with zero auditory latency, musicians (classical musicians at least) don't really use sound to synchronize, because the cue…
I know of a musician who has been performing online shows for the past couple of months. He does them solo, just singing and playing guitar. He streams video using OBS Studio and Crowdcast.io, and all of us attending the show participate through text chat. His video has a latency of about 30 seconds, presumably because it's using a typical RTMP + CDN setup, designed for non-interactive broadcasts. So sometimes after…
That sounds small enough that casting through Discord or Twitch may be an option. Those seem designed more more interactive broadcasts and thus lower latency. I don't know at what point the scaling breaks down.
I've used JamKazam ( https://www.jamkazam.com ) a few times recently to play folk music with some friends. The sort of music we play relies very heavily on listening to each other and improvising, and surprisingly it _just about_ works on JamKazam. It's certainly not perfect, but we're not going to be hanging out in pubs together any time soon. The important number is round-trip latency, and we found that around 25ms…
JamKazam founder here. Happy to come across a user! We see that too: 25ms one-way latency is the max to stay in sync, and that includes both internet + audio device encode/decode, which gets eaten up quite fast! We are looking at providing an optional premium networking service to offer a faster connection as an alternative to the open internet. Nothing too expensive, like $10/month is the goal. Hope that gets you an…
Unfortunately I might not be in many sessions for a while as I replaced my last Windows machine with Linux this weekend, which I don't think you support yet; although I will have a go at getting it working in WINE :)
I've used JamKazam ( https://www.jamkazam.com ) a few times recently to play folk music with some friends. The sort of music we play relies very heavily on listening to each other and improvising, and surprisingly it _just about_ works on JamKazam. It's certainly not perfect, but we're not going to be hanging out in pubs together any time soon. The important number is round-trip latency, and we found that around 25ms…
JamKazam founder here. Happy to come across a user! We see that too: 25ms one-way latency is the max to stay in sync, and that includes both internet + audio device encode/decode, which gets eaten up quite fast! We are looking at providing an optional premium networking service to offer a faster connection as an alternative to the open internet. Nothing too expensive, like $10/month is the goal. Hope that gets you an…
Since you're here, I'll ping you some feedback:
- The UX is, charitably, idiosyncratic. We all found it hellaciously difficult to get started, find each other, start a session that didn't have strangers popping into it, manage audio (more on that below). The UI is honestly just super crazy insanely weird.
- The audio handling is... counterintuitive too. I expect to be able to control my "monitor" mix, and have one person control the master mix. But that just isn't working. Instead of one channel strip per source, we just each see a single fader for each participant (even though each person has vocal mic and instrument mic) and it seems to affect everyone globally.
- Everyone slows down over the course of the song. We're all listening to each other, so the latency builds, and we all end up dragging horribly. Only solution we found was to have the drummer play to a click which is miserable in our genre and generally not fun outside of a studio session (which is "work" anyway).
I _really_ hope you're able to use some of the newfound interest you've got to inject some new life into the service. The core is so promising. Notwithstanding that feedback, I'd pay $10/mo for a non-social private version where I can host my own server, since all my bandmates are within a mile of me.
Any amount of latency seems like too much latency when jamming with others. I could see how this would work with audio engines like SuperCollider, but I'm curious how one goes about this for live recordings.
That impressed me about the low threshold of latency needed, if the distance of less than a hundred meters can be too much for sound to travel between players.
I'm hopeful that latency will continue to reduced, as much as technologically (and physically) possible. Real-time jamming over the wire will continue to improve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds small enough that casting through Discord or Twitch may be an option. Those seem designed more more interactive broadcasts and thus lower latency. I don't know at what point the scaling breaks down.
Twitch has a record of over 2M viewers of a single active steam. I don't think scale for most individual artists is a factor.