How the hell are these bands playing live at home?

[Ric5]

 

[Ric5]

 

[JimmyM]

Since we seem to have a fairly knowledgeable group of folks in here, let me ask you this question:

How do TV studios bring in guests with NO PERCEPTIBLE DELAY??? Of course, not now, when everyone is using their phone and looking pixelated! But in normal times... Are all TV studios interconnected via hardwire? Are they using a network mere humans have no access to?

Please

That imperceptible delay is still there. You just can't tell because it's quite small most of the time. But I've seen remotes from different countries where there's a two second delay. This was especially happening during war coverage. And yes, most networks have their own dedicated networks with dedicated servers. They used to use ISDN, but I hear that standard is going the way of the dodo.

 

[diegom]

They used to use ISDN, but I hear that standard is going the way of the dodo.

I thought ISDN figured somewhere, but wasn't sure...
Maybe it is time to open the Internet2 for Live Jamming applications?

 

[InhumanResource]

Well the Stones apparently did a live thing with Zoom. Apparently you can use that or a website called Jamkazam. Everyone can play in real time allegedly.

So it looks like I've figured it out. Now I just have to figure out how to make my 10 year old audio interface play nice with it

The only way I can see it happening is with a low latency interface and VERY reliable (not to mention fast) internet connection.

 

[callofcthulhu]

the Internet2

electric boogaloo

 

[skyline_01]

I have tried Jamkazam and I still can't get it to recognize my webcam, and the initial audio setup was a bit difficult too. I think their interface/GUI is the most advanced in terms of features and setup but the last few times I tried it I couldn't hear my audio at all and I didn't have the time to troubleshoot. I may give it another go and report back if it's successful.

I have been somewhat successful in using Jamulus over the past few days just joining random people across the world. Last night I joined up with people from Britian, Denmark and Italy and there was little to no latency (that I could hear anyway) and no complaints about timing from the other participants. I use a powerline ethernet adapter to my PC so I think that helps with latency too.

One of the downsides to Jamulus is that it's audio only (as far as I can tell). But I suppose you could use another video conferencing app (Zoom, Hangouts, etc) in conjunction with it and just mute the audio in favor of Jamulus. I am going to suggest this to our band, which has so far been unsuccessful in making the online practice thing work.

 

[JohnnyBottom]

yeah..and Keith Urban was live in triplicate.

 

[--Vissinger --]

regarding the speed of light .. 3x10^8 meters per second. This is a free space measurement. Propagation though wires is about 80% or so of that. But the special thing is the switches on the internet. Every hop adds a bit of latency. So local interaction -> fewer hops, less distance.

Try a traceroute to your buddy's IP address and see how many hops it is.

 

[Droopy_TX]

Thanks for extending the quarrentine for the rest of us with your cute little gathering.

Tyrants gonna tyrant no matter what.

 

[JdoubleH]

There's a large active thread on the DB side about JamKazam and also a number of active threads about other tools.

The summary is that unless you're using the best hardware and Internet service, and unless the group you're working with is geographically close together, and unless there are very few participants, synchronized music sessions can be very disappointing. If you don't need the music to be synchronized, JamKazam and a number of other tools can allow you to put patched sessions together with as many participants and as long distances as desired.

Latency is not a software problem, it is a matter of physics, tied to the speed of light.

Zoom and Skype are great tools, and they work great for one-at-a-time participants. But they don't work well synchronized, and they aren't designed for music.

Last I checked, the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. So, if you’re ten feet from each other on stage (about 10 milliseconds of delay), an electrical signal will travel 1860 miles in that time. You could be in NYC and Chicago and be about half that distance.

Latency on the internet is due to buffering/ data packetization, etc. It is most definitely a software issue.

Network latency is a bit different than the latency related to AD-DA we try to minimize at our recording interfaces. It's a is a fact of life in packet transmission over a network medium (be that copper, fiber, RF, tin cans and a string...). It It's simply cannot be reduced to zero, and it's not just the physics of the transmission media, which is where physical distance comes in. There's also several other sources of delay, which include routing, switching, encapsulation, conversion (serial / parallel) and insertion (all of which often are summarized as "hop count"). The big picture is it takes time for a packet to get from point A to point B. There is no such thing as zero latency when A and B are not collocated.

That said I read that the Loopback feature on some newer interfaces can help in some instances...

 

[frankie5string]

regarding the speed of light .. 3x10^8 meters per second. This is a free space measurement. Propagation though wires is about 80% or so of that. But the special thing is the switches on the internet. Every hop adds a bit of latency. So local interaction -> fewer hops, less distance.

Try a traceroute to your buddy's IP address and see how many hops it is.

In most cases, cross-network traceroutes can be as low as 10ms at the terminating ends. But even a traceroute doesn't factor in application protocol overhead or how the Internet has no delivery guarantee. Private networks based on Internet tech do have delivery guarantees and are much more direct, allowing them to get those times down around 3ms end-to-end.

In fact, when you do a traceroute, there's likely at least a few hops you can't even see because there's so much tunnelling across the network and those tunnels will never respond to a traceroute request. Traceroute doesn't reveal every machine in the way.

 

[frankie5string]

That said I read that the Loopback feature on some newer interfaces can help in some instances...

Not really... The best thing is an audio interface with true monitoring of the analog inputs to the output. But that still only covers your own sounds that you're putting into the interface locally, and it eliminates the latency you get going in, then up to the computer and back down to the interface to hear yourself.

 

[ardgedee]

They used to use ISDN, but I hear that standard is going the way of the dodo.

Consumer-level ISDN is low latency but also very low bandwidth by current standards -- 128 Kbit/second -- so it would be hard to use for real-time multitrack audio unless you had absolutely nothing else using the line other than your audio signal. Multiple ISDN lines are used in parallel over T-series lines for high-bandwidth commercial traffic. A T1 line is 1.5 Mbit/second, a T3 is almost 40 times faster, and the hardware prices and service fees scale accordingly.

Probably better to hope for fiber to come to your town.

 

[frankie5string]

Consumer-level ISDN is low latency but also very low bandwidth by current standards -- 128 Kbit/second -- so it would be hard to use for real-time multitrack audio unless you had absolutely nothing else using the line other than your audio signal. Multiple ISDN lines are used in parallel over T-series lines for high-bandwidth commercial traffic. A T1 line is 1.5 Mbit/second, a T3 is almost 40 times faster, and the hardware prices and service fees scale accordingly.

Probably better to hope for fiber to come to your town.

I personally never saw multitracking over a single ISDN (Dual-B+D)... it was always a T1-3 type line divided up into multiple B channels, then a DBX type companding system wired after the digital to analog stage to bring the track into the tape machine as analog. The companding system we used had a way to stretch the top end available by transposing some of the frequencies down and then opening it back up on the other side. un-decoded it sounded really strange and honky.

 

[audreycashin]

Or are they? They sure seem like they are. But how do they sync up and be able to play off each other so well? Have they really got the delay between members down to so low that you can't notice it? Is this doable on a budget level? What do you need to make it happen, other than a camera and a mic at everyone's house?

Look up LI Musicians We are the world...over 60 musicians on the recording, I know quite a few who contributed.

 

[frankie5string]

Look up LI Musicians We are the world...over 60 musicians on the recording, I know quite a few who contributed.

Yeah, but that wasn't live... Musicians submitted their parts and it was assembled by the group of people at Huntington, right?

 

[lordradish]

Well the Stones apparently did a live thing with Zoom. Apparently you can use that or a website called Jamkazam. Everyone can play in real time allegedly.

So it looks like I've figured it out. Now I just have to figure out how to make my 10 year old audio interface play nice with it

I used Jamkazam for the first time, the other night. I'd originally avoided it, because it seemed like it was just a bunch of amateur/dad band type stuff. I set up an open room, and started playing my synths (wasn't doing bass, that night). After my first improv, all of a sudden, I hear a voice saying, "DUDE, that was so cool!" Then he started playing some drums. Within the hour, I had a guitarist from NYC, another from LA (with some smokin' fusion chops), and a bassist for Montreal, and we ended up jammin' for three hours, till 1 am!

You just have to be specific about the level of musician you wanna play with, unless you wanna be stuck playing Mustang Sally.

 

[lordradish]

The problem is the internet itself. The way it was designed just wont work for real-time collaboration. Latency is unavoidable and unpredictable. If you built a direct hardwired Ethernet connection between band members’ computers that could work, but you’d need custom software and it wouldn’t work over long distances.

So anyone that seems to be doing it in real-time, almost certainly isn’t.

When I did my Jamkazam the other night (hardwired instead of wi-fi), I had almost no latency.

 

[Space Pickle]

It's all prerecorded if it's in sync. Nothing out there works well. Tired to do a lesson last week and couldn't hear my teacher play guitar at all, he could hear me just fine. Very disjointed.

Yes.

The only way to jam live over the internet is to somehow teleport your sounds into the future so they arrive on time in the present.