Real Time Collaboration Question

[AdmNelson]

Hi,

 

Newbie with a question. (If you don't mind...)

 

Does anyone know of any realtime collaborative method?

 

There is bound to be a bit of latency between me and my partner. Is that transmission latency enough to make it impossible for real time internet collaboration?

 

In a nutshell, I am a guitarist and would like to jam or practice with my guitarist buddy who lives 500 miles away. We both have cable internet connections and are willing to invest a moderate amount of money.

 

For a set up: both of us have a spare amp. I would have a line out from my playing amp leading to my PC sound card line input. I would have a line out from my PC sound card output leading to my spare amp.

 

His end would have the same set up.

 

I would guess we would use a peer-to-peer connection between us.

 

I would guess that some on-the-fly audio compression would be used.

 

Now, All I need is to know: is there is any software available to support this?

 

Or is this not technically feasible?

 

(It sounds like a great idea, so it must be one that won't work?)

 

Thanks in advance....

 

[Also, apologies in advance if this is not the right forum to be asking this question....]

[DanS]

Steinberg used to have the Rocket Network, not sure if it's still available.

[AdmNelson]

DanS,

 

Did a net search & it looks like Rocket Network peaked about 2001- 2002. In this article about musical collaboration, it sounds like Rocket was mostly used for moving files about? It is interesting but doesn't seem to involve real time collaboration:

 

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2001_April_13/ai_73175557

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1907546.stm

 

It looks like Digidesign acquired Rocket in 2003.

 

http://www.digidesign.com/news/details.cfm?story_id=49

 

Even so, the truth is:

 

"So the cat was out of the bag. Always be suspicious of folks who capitalize generic nouns. This Internet Recording Studio was not the walk-in virtual recording studio I was looking for, but an Internet Overdubbing Studio where you bring your own (often very expensive) software."

 

http://smw.internet.com/audio/reviews/rocket/index2.html

 

So Rocket comes to a dead end for real time collaboration.

 

Thank you for the suggestion.

 

I guess the question is still open?

[Bunny Knutson]

I don't think real-time internet jamming is possible (yet) because of the inherent latency, but I'm no Rocket scientist.

[AdmNelson]

Bunny,

 

I still have hope. I have an email info request to a company that seems to have taken over an old audio-video conference system called CuSeeMe. Nothing back from them yet. However, I think they use a bounce server so that would only add to the latency.

 

Hope springs eternal......

[nursers]

As a former online faciltator for Rocket, all I'll say is that Rocket was one hell of a product that was perhaps compromised by a lack of commitment from those who used it in the apps toward uniformity. That is, the Logic and Cubase versions for example wouldn't talk to each other.

 

There are a couple of new options on their way from other companies - will be interesting to see what they come up with.

[Fulc]

I understand that there's a new VST plug that enables online collaboration.

 

I think I saw it at KVR... yep, I did.

 

This sort of what you were looking for?

[philbo_Tangent]

I was under the impression that real-time music over TCP/IP isn't possible...

 

One of the things that make the Internet reliable is that messages are tagged & split up while enroute, and may arrive out of sequence at the destination, who reassembles them into sequence again. This works great if you're downloading photos of Terri Hatcher, but is not so hot for real-time music...

[GeorgeVW]

It's not just the latency inherent in TCP/IP (or any other packet-based communications protocol), but basic physics that will work against it. Even assuming perfect speed-of-light transmissions, once you get outside of very local transmissions you start getting into some fairly serious roundtrip latency. Let's take London to L.A. (~6000 miles) as an example. Light travels 186000 miles/second. Pretty fast, right? Break it down, though, and you'll see that that's 186 miles per millisecond, or 32ms for each leg of the trip from L.A. to London and back. This means that you count off and your friend in London doesn't hear your downbeat until 32ms after you've started playing, and you don't hear his response to your downbeat until 32ms after that, or 64ms from your original downbeat. To drive home this point, go grab a delay unit, dial up a 64ms delay, set it to 100% wet and try to play a groove. And this is with theoretically perfect transmissions (i.e. no delays on the transmission line). I'm afraid that unless they figure out electron tunnelling and how to apply it to transmission lines, we'll still have to get together and play in the same room (or at least the same building) for real-time musical interaction.

[AdmNelson]

George,

 

Interesting post - thanks.

 

I agree, one can't fight the physics. Thankfully, I am only dealing with a 1000 mile separation. Also, I am not so sure that round trip signal delay is the correct way to view the situation - I need to think on that a bit....

 

Another potential solution to real time collaboration is using a phone line. Normally, telephone bandwidth is not useful for music: something like 200 to 2000 hz.

 

There is a product, called Phone-Jam, that I found. It has been out for a few years and yet I have found no product reviews on the net. Theoretically, I suppose having an encoder-decoder on each end of the phone line might allow decent sound transmission.

 

I am a little suspicious of this product. The company home page is not much help:

 

http://phone-jam.com/leftdocs/product_info.html

 

The lack of technical specs is probably a sign that the specs aren't much to be proud of.

 

Sam Ash lists the unit (I suspect Sam does not stock it, but drop ships it if someone were to order one.)

 

http://www.samash.com/catalog/showitem.asp?itemid=28492

 

Has anyone heard of this gadget? Seen it reviewed?

 

Thanks....

[zeronyne]

I don't know about Phone Jam, but I've been using ISDN for cross country voiceover collaboration for years. This is a pretty common procedure...cheack A/V company catalogs for the hookup gear.

[nursers]

Great to see you 09

[AlanJayGlueckman]

Hey there, Alan Glueckman, Chairman/President of eJamming, Inc., here. After 5 years of development, we're about to launch real time online collaboration via the eJamming Station [or as near real time as 15mS (milliseconds) within a city, 25-40mS within 1500 miles and 40-50mS cross country. We've even eJammed from NYC to London at 49mS]. Up to 8 players on a given stage can jam together at a time.

 

Our test panels of musicians have accomodated very quickly (surprisingly, to us) to these local delays, and we've been very pleased that many can accomodate to the 50-60mS inherent in jamming US to Europe (remember, when you hit a piano key, it takes 10mS before the mechanism even strikes the note -- and if you're onstage, it takes 30mS for sound to cross the stage from other players).

 

The combination of our technology and musicians' innate ability to accomodate to other players makes for a satisfying experience.

 

How can we do this and keep everyone in sync? We use MIDI triggers (don't scoff -- because you can patch ANY software synth or other sounds and patches to those triggers -- including Gigastudio and East/West, Native Instruments, whatever you've got) and we use our patented technology and alogorithms to delay the sounding of your instrument until you receive data from your fellow eJammers.

 

Any MIDI enabled instrument -- keyboards, drums, guitars (using the GI-20 or the G50 audio to MIDI converter) and bass (especially with the Axon 100 audio to MIDI converter), wind controllers -- can be connected to eJamming.

 

You can record your jams on the eJamming Station and export them to your mixing/editing/sequencing software where you can add vocals and mix with audio.

 

We're looking for Beta Testers (starting in mid-late June on the Mac and mid-late July on the PC). You can see a demo of eJamming at www.ejamming.com and sign up to Beta Test at our site.

 

We hope you'll find eJamming useful and compelling and that it will become a part of your life every day.

 

Thanks for reading this.

 

Alan

[nursers]

Hi Alan and welcome. I'll certainly sign up for the beta test