No Latency Internet Rehearsal Connection - Options?

[ElmerJFudd]

I realize no latency isn't possible, negligible? Have a singer I'd like to work with. Getting together to rehearse is highly inconvenient because of distance and schedule. Have they cracked this nut yet? Not for overdubs, but to perform together in real time - as if together in the room. I've got 50up/50down not sure about the singer yet. Would work great for giving and getting lessons too if it exists. I've tried with Skype/FaceTime in the past - latency is highly annoying - really not reasonably effective.

 

Very skeptical thread at GearSlutz I was reading.

 

Products:

https://www.musicianlink.com

 

https://www.jamkazam.com

 

http://llcon.sourceforge.net

 

http://www.ejamming.com/learn-more/

[lerber3]

Physics is a bitch.

[roygBiv]

Hi Elmer

 

I've never used it, but NINJAM is designed to allow realtime "jamming" over the internet.

 

http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

 

The people behind it are the same Geniuses behind Reaper, an amazing recording software package.

 

so it would definitely be worth trying it out.

 

roy

[ElmerJFudd]

These guys say they are 80miles apart - I am not sure if they mention their up/down speed. They are able to count off and play in time. Video suggests the audio recorded is from the headphone output of one of the players.

 

[video:youtube]

[kelp]

I just started experimenting with JamKazam. Really nice interface with tons of stats regarding latency. I ran an experiment with a friend 150 miles away. Latency was too much. However, my up is a measly 1M. Going to try again with other members of my band.

 

The price is right - free.

[ElmerJFudd]

Hi Elmer

 

I've never used it, but NINJAM is designed to allow realtime "jamming" over the internet.

 

http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

 

The people behind it are the same Geniuses behind Reaper, an amazing recording software package.

 

so it would definitely be worth trying it out.

 

roy

 

I see, somehow by measuring latency as measures at a certain BPM everyone hears each other after the latency has already been compensated for. Yes, it is very weird, but worth a try!

[roygBiv]

Yeah, you may already know this, but the backstory behind Reaper is fascinating.

 

The developer/company owner, Justin Frankel, previously made Winamp, then sold that for a lot of money and then invented gnutella, kicking off the peer-to-peer file sharing mania.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel

 

His main baby now, Reaper is amazingly powerful, and only takes like 50 MB or so. Also only costs $60. Been using it for close to 10 years now. A bit of a steep learning curve, but incredibly powerful. And fast.

 

For these reasons, I would guess NINJAM (if Frankel is still actively working on it) would be pretty state of the art, as far as capabilities anyway.

[EscapeRocks]

FYI,

 

We have used JamKazam with great success.

 

Granted, each of us has high-speed Fiber internet to our homes, which most likely helps.

 

None of us live in the same town, and one of us lives 287 miles away.

 

I'm using my Steinberg UR22 to get my keys into the online session.

 

My drummer will hook up his electronic "home practice kit" and go thru is audio i/o, and same with everyone else.

 

Elmer, we mostly use it as you want to...one on one sessions, to go over some parts or ideas. i.e. The guitarist and I will work on what he's doing during an intro solo and what pads I'll use...

 

It's cool to be at home, have an idea for a new song transition, and be able to hook up with my bass player in Austin, and go over it, live.

[cphollis]

These guys say they are 80miles apart - I am not sure if they mention their up/down speed. They are able to count off and play in time. Video suggests the audio recorded is from the headphone output of one of the players.

 

[video:youtube]

 

Interesting demo, although the cynic in me realizes they're only 80 miles apart, and running over some of the best network infrastructure in the country. It can't get better than this, and could certainly be worse.

 

And, even them, I still hear a hint of delay in their timing. May be good enough for working out parts, but maybe not good to prep for live play.

[ElmerJFudd]

FYI,

 

We have used JamKazam with great success.

 

Granted, each of us has high-speed Fiber internet to our homes, which most likely helps.

 

None of us live in the same town, and one of us lives 287 miles away.

 

I'm using my Steinberg UR22 to get my keys into the online session.

 

My drummer will hook up his electronic "home practice kit" and go thru is audio i/o, and same with everyone else.

 

Elmer, we mostly use it as you want to...one on one sessions, to go over some parts or ideas. i.e. The guitarist and I will work on what he's doing during an intro solo and what pads I'll use...

 

It's cool to be at home, have an idea for a new song transition, and be able to hook up with my bass player in Austin, and go over it, live.

 

This is interesting. I'm going to convince the singer it's worth trying out a few things. I'll report back with how it went.

[MoodyBluesKeys]

Unless located really close and on same provider (like a neighborhood with SuddenLink, so they are all on the same local subnet of the ISP), physical location does not correlate with latency.

The routing protocols used for IP routing on the Internet will not necessarily even route a single group of packets over the same path, particularly when there are a number of "hops."

The time taken for each "hop" is measured (generally) in milliseconds. Latency is the total time from beginning to end (all of the "hops" added).

 

Latency also depends on the amount of other traffic on each router (how saturated the particular medium is at the moment), the processing speed of each device in the chain, how many other things the computer is having to do at the moment.

 

The result is that a 300 mile physical distance between two major Internet points (say NYC to DC) can easily have less latency than 50 miles from NYC to Podunk, NY.

 

I'm doing some stuff now using VOIP (voice over IP). The actual amount of latency is not as critical as the variations during time.

 

Having said all of the above, if one wants to setup a rehearsal Internet connection between people, each person needs a fast broadband connection, fast computer with enough memory, fast method of processing digital into analog audio (just like playing virtual instruments), and some tolerance for the inevitable delays (someone who plays large pipe organs would have it a bit easier, because they already have learned to play the lower pedals a bit before they expect them to actually sound).

 

[Losendoskeys]

FYI,

 

We have used JamKazam with great success.

 

Granted, each of us has high-speed Fiber internet to our homes, which most likely helps.

 

None of us live in the same town, and one of us lives 287 miles away.

 

I'm using my Steinberg UR22 to get my keys into the online session.

 

My drummer will hook up his electronic "home practice kit" and go thru is audio i/o, and same with everyone else.

 

Elmer, we mostly use it as you want to...one on one sessions, to go over some parts or ideas. i.e. The guitarist and I will work on what he's doing during an intro solo and what pads I'll use...

 

It's cool to be at home, have an idea for a new song transition, and be able to hook up with my bass player in Austin, and go over it, live.

This^^

Bass player is 60 miles away as is the drummer and it works.

We all have fibre and the same little Yamaha AG06 mixer which means tech support is easy........

Remember latency is also caused by the hardware and the speed of your PC, as well as the driver and broadband connection.

[Hoochie]

These guys say they are 80miles apart - I am not sure if they mention their up/down speed. They are able to count off and play in time. Video suggests the audio recorded is from the headphone output of one of the players.

 

[video:youtube]

 

Interesting demo, although the cynic in me realizes they're only 80 miles apart, and running over some of the best network infrastructure in the country. It can't get better than this, and could certainly be worse.

 

And, even them, I still hear a hint of delay in their timing. May be good enough for working out parts, but maybe not good to prep for live play.

 

I happen to have first hand beta experience with this product.

We started using it as the first test case of an entire band.

 

At the time 2009-2010 you had to have a solid connection.

I had fiber to the house rated at 25/200( crazy huh ).

Some of the other people had DSL or cable.

It worked to a point and then started breaking up.

That point was about 4 devices.

This was all in the greater SF Bay Area except me in Valley.

When I say greater, for those that don't know, it's an area about 75

miles across with the bay smack in the center.

It's huge.

Driving from San Jose to Novato in Marin county can take an easy hour and a half.

So it really saved us a lot of drive time and renting studios.

 

Given the state of the internet now I think it would be far better.

You can do skype conference calls now with 10 attendees no problem.

 

Basically it was a little digital mixer that gave you a mic in, an instrument in,

a mix/headphone out, and an Ethernet jack.

There was a control server that it connected to in order to do all the digital

mixing and your device was hosted off the server.

You listened to yourself in real time and you could adjust the level

of each far side thing in the GUI. Basically dial in your own mix.

You could also drop the codec down a notch or two to slim down bandwidth.

It got kind of Telephone quality but it worked.

The interface was well thought out.

 

It looks like it's still in production. Good for them.

I should bust mine out and give it a spin. If I can find it.

 

John

 

 

[chas50]

I've used NINJAM just a little.

I thought it worked good.

 

[WesG]

The biggest key is not bandwidth available to you, but rather, the latency; especially the latency to your own provider. My cable connection has about 30ms latency, my T1 has about 4ms latency, my fiber connection has about 3ms latency. And then, of course, there is the internet latency you can't control....

 

If I was doing remote rehearsals and had a budget, I would provision an ISDN line at both locations and run off-the-shelf codecs for the broadcast industry over it. Essentially, your own private tieline connecting two studios.

[ElmerJFudd]

Hi, guys. Following up on this.

 

So I got Jamkazam installed on my iMac and the singer's MacBook Pro and tried it out last night for first rehearsal.

 

On the MacBook he used internal 3.5mm jack for headphones and a USB mic. Software reported the interface was getting something like 5ms latency.

 

On my side, I was using an Apogee Quartet for mic input and keyboard input. Software reported my audio device was getting 13ms latency. This I do not understand, as there is no option to lower buffer - on the Jamkazam forums they say the Mac software always attempts to connect at lowest possible latency. I can get better performance from Logic with the Quartet so not sure what's up with Jkzm.

 

Anyway, with just the two of us we were able to practice. It's not perfect, there is additional latency in the internet connection and there is definitely jitter. But it is substantially better than FaceTime or Skype (which is really unuseable to perform live in sync). For me, the trick is accepting where the vocal is falling in time as the singer's choice (although it's latency that's doing it) and keeping my tempo steady no matter what. The moment you start adjusting to match the singer (reacting as we would normally in the same room), then he/she starts compensating as well and then it never really jives or feels good.

 

So at the moment I give it a "much better than nothing". We were able to speak, go over how the arrangements would go, talk about tempos, get a feel for how it will be when we play live. Work out harmonies, etc. etc. If you can stay together with the latency and drift in Jkzm you will be overjoyed when actually in the room together for a gig.

 

- not sure if the Jmkzm hardware would improve latency and jitter. Also not sure why the Quartet is not doing what it's capable of with the software. Will have to experiment some more. If anyone has ideas, I am all ears.

 

My next test will be testing NINJAM. If I am understanding correctly, they are using similar technique to online games. Buffering the music for everyone to ensure delivery at the right time for all. If I understand correctly, everyone plays to a click and there is a count-off to build up buffer. Streaming starts for everyone in time. That's really interesting.

[paulnajar]

Great thread Guys. After reading through this I have a question about NINJAM for those who have used it.

 

On their webpage they state that each band member is playing along one 'measure' behind the rest of the band. Is that right or has the tech progressed so you can all play on the same bar at the same time now?

[SamuelBLupowitz]

So I got Jamkazam installed on my iMac and the singer's MacBook Pro and tried it out last night for first rehearsal. . . . at the moment I give it a "much better than nothing". We were able to speak, go over how the arrangements would go, talk about tempos, get a feel for how it will be when we play live. Work out harmonies, etc. etc. If you can stay together with the latency and drift in Jkzm you will be overjoyed when actually in the room together for a gig.

+1, that's been my experience as well.

[Noah DC]

Thanks for sharing these notes, all - real interesting for those of us who dying to do more than just overdubs. Were all of you on wireless for the rehearsals? I would expect (and have been told via my roommate's work IT folks) that plugging directly into the modem from the computer would reduce the latency. To be clear, I'm not knowledgeable at all about this stuff - just curious about how it might help.

[U.Honey]

We did some online practicing with my band using JamKazaam. This was about 3 years ago. It turned out that Wifi was causing a lot of latency so everyone arranged an ethernet cable to connect to the internets. Once we were all wired the latencies went down a lot. We were physically within 50 miles from each other but turned out the distance didn't really matter. The biggest latency came from going from one ISP to another. For example, I had Time Warner cable and so did the guitar player and the latency between us was about 10 milliseconds. That's easily low enough for practicing real time. But, the rest of the band was with another ISP and there was a slight delay, audible in particular with the drums. Had we all been with the same ISP we would have been able to "groove over the internet".

[Garubi]

We have been in strict lockdown for more than two months now, so we pretty tried all the solution available

 

In the last week in an italian forum (supportimusicali.it) emerged another application: it's called Jamulus: http://llcon.sourceforge.net/

Lot of people on that forum is using it and many seems happy...

I have to say that I briefly tried it with my band's guitarist and, even if the results were better than other similar app, still the latency is quite noticeable...but as other said physic is physic ;-)

[kelp]

After trying a couple of different options, I've had the best luck with Jamulus. Here are some key points:

 

1. Everyone should have an audio interface with a low-latency driver. Stay away from built-in soundcards and ASIO4ALL.

2. Everyone should be wired. WiFi, regardless of speed, has too much packet jitter.

3. Run your own server. The Jamulus install allows this. You need to understand how to forward ports in your router.

4. Depending on distance, better results may be achieved by having the person most centrally located run the server.

5. Monitor yourself locally (mute yourself in the app mixer).

6. Understand that the timekeeper has the worst situation. If a beat is played, I hear it and react to it. The drummer hears my latency. As others play with the drummer I obviously hear their latency.

7. Understand that things won't be perfect. Audio will garble from time to time. Don't expect "CD quality" sound.

8. Ensure minimal network traffic at your location. No Netflix. No YouTube. No Zoom. Etc.

 

Given all of this, I've had successful rehearsals with drums-bass-guitar-keys-vocals, even with faster tempo songs (>160bpm). Ideal? Far from it. Workable? Yes.

[elif]

... 6. Understand that the timekeeper has the worst situation. If a beat is played, I hear it and react to it. The drummer hears my latency. As others play with the drummer I obviously hear their latency. ...

 

I think this could be mitigated somewhat if each node were synchronized to a distributed time reference and the players sync'd to a locally generated click track rather than to the audio from others. There are protocols that provide a distributed synchronized clock to network nodes to very high accuracy (e.g. EtherCAT, PTP). These are all on a common LAN however. Over the public internet, NTP may be good enough to get ms accuracy if the time server was part of the mesh rather than an NTP global server.

 

I have no idea whether these applications implement this.

[ElmerJFudd]

... 6. Understand that the timekeeper has the worst situation. If a beat is played, I hear it and react to it. The drummer hears my latency. As others play with the drummer I obviously hear their latency. ...

 

I think this could be mitigated somewhat if each node were synchronized to a distributed time reference and the players sync'd to a locally generated click track rather than to the audio from others. There are protocols that provide a distributed synchronized clock to network nodes to very high accuracy (e.g. EtherCAT, PTP). These are all on a common LAN however. Over the public internet, NTP may be good enough to get ms accuracy if the time server was part of the mesh rather than an NTP global server.

 

I have no idea whether these applications implement this.

 

Indeed, I've thought about this too and similarly feel there is a solution based on buffering and playing to metronome. Making everyone experience the music in time, but in reality starting at different times. The jitter is still a problem though, but perhaps it would be better than what is possible now.

[midinut]

Hi, guys. Following up on this.

 

So I got Jamkazam installed on my iMac and the singer's MacBook Pro and tried it out last night for first rehearsal.

 

On the MacBook he used internal 3.5mm jack for headphones and a USB mic. Software reported the interface was getting something like 5ms latency.

 

On my side, I was using an Apogee Quartet for mic input and keyboard input. Software reported my audio device was getting 13ms latency. This I do not understand, as there is no option to lower buffer - on the Jamkazam forums they say the Mac software always attempts to connect at lowest possible latency. I can get better performance from Logic with the Quartet so not sure what's up with Jkzm.

 

Anyway, with just the two of us we were able to practice. It's not perfect, there is additional latency in the internet connection and there is definitely jitter. But it is substantially better than FaceTime or Skype (which is really unuseable to perform live in sync). For me, the trick is accepting where the vocal is falling in time as the singer's choice (although it's latency that's doing it) and keeping my tempo steady no matter what. The moment you start adjusting to match the singer (reacting as we would normally in the same room), then he/she starts compensating as well and then it never really jives or feels good.

 

So at the moment I give it a "much better than nothing". We were able to speak, go over how the arrangements would go, talk about tempos, get a feel for how it will be when we play live. Work out harmonies, etc. etc. If you can stay together with the latency and drift in Jkzm you will be overjoyed when actually in the room together for a gig.

 

- not sure if the Jmkzm hardware would improve latency and jitter. Also not sure why the Quartet is not doing what it's capable of with the software. Will have to experiment some more. If anyone has ideas, I am all ears.

 

My next test will be testing NINJAM. If I am understanding correctly, they are using similar technique to online games. Buffering the music for everyone to ensure delivery at the right time for all. If I understand correctly, everyone plays to a click and there is a count-off to build up buffer. Streaming starts for everyone in time. That's really interesting.

 

 

Our band is getting ready to try Jamkazam as well. I was watching a video on installing and setting it up and I seem to remember them saying you could adjust the buffer settings until you got an acceptable latency number. I may have misheard it and will go back and check my YouTube history and try to find that video and watch it again.