MusicPlayerNetwork.com Forums Featured Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage Jam over the internet

Is anyone out there successfully using any of the jam across the internet systems? Or if not successful can you tell me about the difficulties?.

I was going to try and set it up. I even bought a domain name, but I have too many other coals in the fire.

http://liveglobaljam.com


oops! I lost this one.

Dan

I am unfamilar.

Seems like there would be issues with latency? It might be small but there's no way to stream 2 or more ways in/out in real time using the interwebs as the hub.

For me, jamming means split-second here and now spontaneous shifts in feel, groove, atmosphere etc.
Latency is a bit of a buzzkill for that sort of funs. Cheers, Kuru

duplicate

Think about it though. Kids are playing interactive games 2 way.

Dan

If they are happy, I am happy for them.

There is latency, it isn't possible to eliminate it.
As I said, I am not familiar with it and have not tried it.

But then, I am already playing a lot, including tonight and tomorrow night. Maybe Saturday, should know soon...

Latency is certainly an issue and one of the reasons I asked here. So distance certainly plays a roll. I would imagine you don't wanna be more than a couple hundred miles apart. I've done a lot of testing about latency and we found the magic number seems to be as long as you are under 10-12ms you are good to go. But there is always latency any time you are playing modern electronic keyboards, digital modelers and pedals and electronic drums as well as running through a digital mixer. It is accumulative however.

Yes, I play guitar or bass primarily. So I'd need to go through my audio interface and possibly my DAW (for plugins). That latency is pretty low (Thunderbolt 2) but it does add to the internet latency.

I hadn't considered the proximity but certainly that could be a factor.
We have lots of "dead spots" up here. People off yonder have service, I have service but it can take time for something to find it's way from point A to point B.

So, location could also be a factor. I've got friends who live about 10 miles away and a text can sometimes take until they've moved to another location to arrive and vice versa. Internet service is very slow out there as well.

There was some doings about this a dozen or so years ago - in fact one of the rare times I got taken to dinner at a NAMM show was when I attended a demo of such a system and had a lot of questions, comments, and suggestions afterward. But I don't think it ever really worked well enough to get popular. At least not among the people I know who play music. Probably because it was unpredictable and needed to be re-calibrated every time, maybe every song.

Latency is unavoidable. The trick is that nobody hears the same thing at the same time. When I hear you playing and I pick up and play along with you, I'm in sync at my end, but if what you hear isn't what you're playing, but rather, what I'm playing (mixed with you) and sending it back to you. It's probably terrible for singing, and maybe for drumming, but for direct electric guitars it can work.

10 ms of latency isn't going to throw you off time unless you're really fussy, but some singers, while not really thrown off time, get stress because of the delay. And of course with latency of 2-3 ms, when the voice in the headphones mixes in your head with the voice coming up to your ears from your throat, unless you turn up the cans really loud so it swamps out the "direct" signal, you'll hear a comb-filtered version of your voice.

Location is indeed a factor. The speed of light is almost 200 miles per millisecond so there’s no avoiding that plus whatever burden internet connections are going to add. But texting is a whole different thing and not related to this discussion

Texting is only relevant to the fact that some places do not have cable connections and use the same servers as cell phones.
So, slow ping is slow ping. A friend off yonder has Comcast wireless, the only service that is available. Sometimes, it just goes away.

Brian Hardgroove (from Public Enemy) and I gave a presentation at a NAMM TEC Tracks session about collaborating on an unreleased Chuck D. I'll have to dig up the Powerpoint, I did a lot of research on the topic. Bottom line is that audio-based online jamming is a bear, and yes, location makes a huge difference. If you both live in, say, Chicago and have good broadband, then the latency will likely be acceptable. But if you want to do a trans-oceanic collaboration, or live in LA and want to work with someone in New York, ain't gonna happen. Well, at least not without getting frustrated.

It seems to me that MIDI would work, though - have you looked into https://jammr.net/?

Also don't forget there is a whole forum right here at musicplayer.com that is devoted to exactly this issue: LINK

t'was excellent. i was in the front row.

I’m been trying a bunch of things and found a new one that is very promising ... Sonobus.net

It’s easy to setup, can run as a stand alone program or can plug into your DAW as a VST. It’s free and requires no additional hardware other than an interface, your computer (Win or Mac) and an ethernet connection to broadband internet. As with all things like this, latency is an issue but I have been successful jamming with others at about 150 miles.

There is a Sonobus Facebook group if you wanna take a look.

Thanks...looks interesting. I'll see if I can talk Brian Hardgroove or Dr. Walker into trying it out with me.