On-line jamming

[ivanthetrble]

Hi all! Not sure this is the right place to post this so mods, feel free to move it as you see fit.

Has anyone had experience with the on-line jamming software like SonoBox or Jamulus? My current project has members who are about 1 1/2 hours drive time apart and it does make getting together in person a bit of a chore. I had heard about some of the on-line programs that will allow you to play together on-line but so far I have not been able to talk to anyone who has done it successfully. From what I have learned we will all need a wired interweb connection (no WiFi), an audio interface of some type, mics, etc. Has anyone tried this and if so, how successful was it? Any advice would be mucho apprecitated! Thanks!

ITT

 

[DirtDog]

Tried it during the early days of the pandemic. Didn’t work well for us, likely since one of the guys was rural and his ping was pretty high. Tried almost everything including setting up our own Jamulus server and optimizing the crap out of it. No good for us. I’m urban and have Gigabit FTTH. We ended up writing asynchronously.

Might be worth trying if both of you have fast internet. Prepare for frustration if not!

 

[ivanthetrble]

Thanks! That was one of my biggest worries about it, one guy is kind of out in the sticks and not sure how fast his internet is. The rest of us are local and should have good upload/download speeds. I suppose it would only work as well as the weakest link in the system.

 

[KevInDaBassment]

...I suppose it would only work as well as the weakest link in the system.

Bingo

Would be a better use of time to find a rehearsal spot that is partway for everyone to meet at IMO.

 

[Bob_Ross]

4 years ago in a TB thread about JamKazam I wrote:

my bandmates gave it a trial run last week and they report that it's just not sync-accurate enough to allow for real-time musical collaboration...unless everything you play is molto rubato

But then 3 years ago in another TB thread I wrote:

this week an acquaintance told me he's been having successful R&B jam sessions with bandmates ~2,500 miles away using SoundJack and they've experienced no latency!!!

(Note, I still have not gotten around to trying SoundJack myself)

 

[ivanthetrble]

Hum, that does make me wonder. Internet is fast but not that fast. If you assume data travels at the speed of light (which it doesn't), it would take 0.01342 seconds for light to travel 2500 miles. So, no, I don't think it is possible to have no latency at that distance. That is a small amount of latency (13.42 milliseconds) but again, that assumes data speeds that are likely not achievable. All these programs are going to have some latency, I don't think there is a way around that, but keeping it to a reasonable level seems to be the goal. Most things I have read so far said that having all parties within 500 miles of each other is optimal.

 

[ddnidd1]

This topic comes up periodically and eventually almost everyone gives up due to the inherent latency.

And one thing to be aware of is that even though the distance may be (arbitrarily) 250 miles straight from point to point, the data over the internet may necessarily take a very circuitous route getting the data from point to point, increasing the latency. The pings will vary over time as automatic routing takes place.

 

[ivanthetrble]

Tried it during the early days of the pandemic. Didn’t work well for us, likely since one of the guys was rural and his ping was pretty high. Tried almost everything including setting up our own Jamulus server and optimizing the crap out of it. No good for us. I’m urban and have Gigabit FTTH. We ended up writing asynchronously.

Might be worth trying if both of you have fast internet. Prepare for frustration if not!

I wonder if there is some cut off speed below which its not even worth trying?

 

[ddnidd1]

You might want to check out previous posts on this topic. Some folks have already been through all of this in great detail. You could save yourself some time.

 

[DirtDog]

I wonder if there is some cut off speed below which its not even worth trying?

It’s not so much the speed (although that IS a factor)….but the latency of the signal travelling across multiple network nodes on the internet. Especially in the context of the full duplex requirement.

Zero latency would be ideal, but I’ve heard (but not experienced) that 30ms latency is useable in an online jam context. A whole note at 120bpm is 500ms. A 30ms latency is the equivalent of a 16th note. That might get messy quickly.

think I’d want a ping, or latency, at less than 10ms to be useable.

 

[dannylectro]

I did use Jamulus with fairly good results in the past year. Definitely need to wire directly to your modem. It was with a trio—bass, guitar/vox, drums, so not a lot of complexity.
The drummer was set up in a basement room with three mics on his drums into a small mixer then into his interface.
Similar setup for the guitarist/vocalist.
I was plugged directly into my Focusrite, with a separate mic plugged in as well, but just for talkback purposes.

 

[SteveCS]

Has anyone had experience with the on-line jamming software like SonoBox or Jamulus?

I use Jamulus regularly, and as a band we use it weekly. We have our own private server hosted by AWS in London, which is about 40 miles as the crow flies. All of us have full fibre high-speed high capacity internet (even out in the sticks where I am). Typical ping is 10-12ms and overall latency/delay is 35-40ms, even with streaming TV services running in the other parts of the house. It works fine, perhaps because we only run 4 channels. Some of the public servers are not so fast (although plenty are). The main requirement other than a good interface is a wired ethernet connection to the router - wireless is invariably a lost cause, IME The biggest problem with using the public servers as a band is being gate-crashed, but you can always mute 'intruders'.