Jamulus does not appear to have an iOS client, so you're out of luck if you want to use an iPad with those guys.
Jamulus does have Windows, macOS and Linux clients so you're looking at PC/Mac for hardware. Additionally, a two-input audio interface would be helpful (one for a mic so you can communicate, the other to run your bass direct to the Jamulus server).
Finally, it's very helpful to be on a wired (Ethernet) connection between your computer and your router. Using Wifi introduces unwanted instability to the comms links. Wifi does not automatically add latency, but the quality of the signal can degraded with dropped packets, etc that can affect latency.
And even with all of that......Jamulus is subject to network latencies that can make things unusable. My BL set up Jamulus server on a dedicated Linux box, both of us on wired connections, both of us on high speed internet (me on gigabit fiber, him on cable internet). Even with just the two of us, we were getting 60-80-100ms latency. Unusable for us. We live about 30km apart. If we lived closer, we might have better luck.
We stopped trying to connect synchronously like that but have since recently revived our efforts using Jack and JackTrip P2P solutions on Linux machines (using Ubuntu Studio) to negate going through a central server somewhere and not needing Jamulus in the middle. We'll see how that works out.
Quoting myself here to report on our recent efforts. Last night, we connected to each other and experienced acceptable latency ~20ms or less. This setup was truly peer-to-peer, no Jamulus or JamKazam or whatever server involved. Our previous efforts using these tools gave us 60-80-100ms latency so I’d say this new method is a significant improvement!
The setup used Jack and Jacktrip in UDP mode and port forwarding on both ends to enable the peer to peer connection. We were both running Ubuntu Studio configurations on both ends. Earlier experiments with macOS on one end were not successful for whatever reason. I used my SSL2+ interface and my guitarist was using a small Focusrite unit. We had our computers connected to our respective routers using Ethernet, not WiFi.
The upside was low latency, albeit with a compromise on audio quality, a function of UDP not bothering to recover dropped packets. As such, voices sometimes sounded a bit robotic but our timing never suffered due to latency issues. We both run high speed internet (gigabit FTTH in my case, cable in my guitarists case). As we rehearse and record, I’ll capture high quality bass tracks on this end. If we have something we like, I’ll send the bass tracks to my guitarist after the fact for him to work on. We’re also doing video - we’ll capture video real-time locally on each side and send files around after the fact. We are not attempting real-time streaming video. Although we might start a zoom call separately so we can each monitor each other visually. It with the latency on those systems that just might throw things off too much.
The downside is that there’s a learning curve to set up the modem and the software environment. Hardly plug and play. Jacktrip is command line only so that might scare less “computery” people off. Also have to enable port forwarding for Jacktrip to be able communicate peer to peer so anyone trying this needs to know how to configure their modem to do this.
Most of the easier to use GUI based solutions seem NOT to be peer to peer and don’t use UDP or port forwarding. While this makes it easier to install and launch these solutions, this is part of the latency equation.
In our refined setup, theoretically we are only experiencing the minimum of network latency plus the hardware latency. Network latency seems to be about 10ms, hardware latency about the same for a total of 20ms latency. That’s perfectly fine even with the audio quality compromise.
Not being a network engineer. I’m coming to realize that there’s a trade off between audio quality and latency. If you want low latency, expect lower quality audio. If you want high quality audio, expect more latency.
Expectations for high quality, real-time musical collaboration certainly challenges this reality.
