Jamkazam - Play with multiple musicians in real time in different locations.

I tried this a couple of years ago after some bandmates in an original project moved to different cities.

DAYS of futzing. Buying cables. Googling for hours.

We came to the conclusion that the technology just wasn't there yet.

There was another site we tried that had like jam templates with a click track. We realized that what it did was delay everything then play it back to you in time with your click. So it was not simultaneous, and resulted in a very lacklustre experience.

I'm kind of surprised they haven't figured out a way to do this yet. Maybe this virus scare will light the fire under some techies butt to figure it out!

 

I got back online again. Interestingly, once again after I deleted my hardware profile and re-created it, JK asked me if I wanted to test my hardware online. Saying yes, a queue in the server opened for me, and now here I am online with the server.

I changed my personal info in JK, I should show online now as just "D H", no location or other public info.

If deleting and re-building my hardware profile always allows me in, that's not too bad, a work-around that I can live with.

Edit: I just exited the JK app without signing out of the server, then restarted the application, and this time I was connected right away. Perhaps the trick is to not sign out of the application. Btw, the application appears to be some sort of browser, perhaps based on a popular browser, or possibly written just for JK. I don't know how it deals with cookies or security intrusions.

... And disconnected a few times, somewhat randomly. I notice a number of people in the CHAT window (on the RH side of the window) were talking about server downtimes. Perhaps JK is under more login pressure than usual. Finally decided to hang it up for the night.

 

Sorry people, unless we are all in the same CITY, this just isn't gonna work. Yer basically just taking turns playing along with a pre-recorded track. There cannot be true interactive musical performance with standard internet latencies. Not counting your equipment, and any latency issues you might have therein.

THE INTERNET: On a good day, it's 157 milliseconds from Here ( Canada West Coast) to Europe. That's 157mS EACH WAY, and multiplied by however many musicians you are trying to jam with at the time. Ping time to Australia is 200 milliseconds. (each way!) Keep in mind At 120 BPM a sixteenth note will have a duration of 125 ms...

And keep in mind, there is PACKET LOSS just in the cabling, and routers drop out with rather grim frequency all the time ( hacked, rebooted for maintenance, or just hardware failures)

Real time internet jamming is 22nd-century stuff - if at all

 

I appreciate seeing the math, thank you!

The JK app has self-testing for network. It estimates my system with its wifi network connection could probably handle 3 synchronized audio sessions -- meaning in our case 3 people jamming with audio and without video -- or 2 synchronized audio/video sessions. And while testing, it complained a few times that I was using wifi instead of direct connect. I would imagine the test would have been happier and produced better results with a cable.

No matter what the testing says though, latency rules.

I would imagine this tool could be useful for teaching, especially one-on-one. And potentially for gigs where the band is together in one location, playing to a selected online audience that is only watching. But jamming may be asking a lot. I'm still willing to try it if someone wants to try though, as long as we can get connected to their server.

 

Mark Dresser does telematic concerts with musicians from around the world, but then again they happen at university’s with super high speed internet and the best cables you can get.

 

tried all night to start a session but no matter what I'm doing its saying: "disconnected from server" cant connect at all

 

Yea, it's been spotty at best. I just tried to re-connect, using all my superstitions acquired from the last few hours of trying. Nothing worked.

I think their server is being hammered by more people than they ever dreamed would be interested.

 

Business review of the company and nine competitors:

https://www.owler.com/company/jamkazam

 

I just signed up but I need an adapter for my Macbook Air to hardwire to my router.

 

Most bands have members in the same city. Likely less than 15km apart. Current ISP latency can be around 10-20ms Regular people can buy Internet packages of 1500mbps down/ 940mbps up. Insane speeds compared to just 5 years ago. We won't need to wait 80 years to get real time jamming. This will be done within the next 5 years if demand is strong enough (latency performance driven more by the online gaming industry than by musicians, but we can piggy back those development). Wired ethernet performance will always be superior to wifi performance. Keep those wired networks in your home.

 

Yea, the JK server is getting hammered again. I'm afraid that there is just not enough capacity to handle the whole world's furloughed musicians.

During "old-normal" times access to the JK server might have been reasonable, but not now. Today, anything that we try to do online in real time is likely to be very difficult due to sheer numbers of people, and those things that do work today may not work tomorrow.

When everyone starts to understand what "new-normal" is, we might want to try this again.

 

BTW, the first time I read of a musical performance of people performing in separate rooms and synchronized via the Internet was perhaps 20 years ago at a university. I forgot the details, but each musician was performing with each other in real time via an Intranet. Special circumstances, using the best hardware and network available, way back then. The needed tech since then has improved and become more affordable and common. This can happen fairly soon as the online gaming industry continues to grow, and as pandemic concerns encourage "work at home via the Internet".

 

Musicians have been griping for years about Jamkazam and other "real time" jamming schemes. Latency is the killer.

A better bet today for more immediate satisfaction is for each band member to individually record their tracks at home and meet up in a DAW.

 

Yes, especially for an original band. Compose/arrange at home and put the pieces together in DAW.

 

Notes on telematic music production (Dessen)

The great trombonist Michael Dessen just shares this really informative article about telematic performance that could be helpful during the quarantine.

 

He's pretty clear in interviews that it can only work with access to the sort of bandwidth that those institutions have

 

a local fiber link won’t address latency in the network or setups of the other musicians. It’s a systemic issue that can’t be solved by a tiny company like that a one.

 

True. We've got "neighborhood friendly" high bandwidth fiber here -- and pay for it -- and yet during the old-normal, there were frequent, sometimes predictable times when it was noticeably slow due to over-selling the bandwidth. For example, SuperBowl, election nights, etc.

Lately, when many people and kids are physically at home all day long, hitting the Web for work or school, or just for entertainment, service has been pretty slow. During the old-normal, we would really notice access delays in the evenings after my wife got home from work, particularly when we were more likely to stream a video; this week it's been slow in the middle of the day. More evidence of bandwidth over-selling and fair-use in the neighborhood. In contrast with video streaming, low demand services like character-based web forums like TB, etc., cruise through bandwidth congestion nearly unnoticed.

Institutional and industrial web service can be purchased with guaranteed testable minimum bandwidth around the clock, and often special fiber/cable is run through the streets to support that. Those users will setup their computer systems to expect those minimums, and then they will set up the rest of their production processes to expect that kind of throughput. In most cases the web service provider is held contractually responsible for that level of service and they can be penalized or even sued if they fail to provide it. This is very different from the "neighborhood" service providers most people have access to at home.

(Edit: I could tell career related stories about institutional web service providers and the early days of fiber... Cross-country runs, and plows hitting the fiber, etc. Funny.)

 

And we’re still dealing with an Internet that was designed for “best effort” with packet drops, resends, reassembled transmissions, etc. Quality of service priorities come into play with voice and video transmissions. One-at-a-time communications as in Skype are working well, but we still have a way to go for interactive musical performance.