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Playing live over the internet with low/no latency? Is it even possible?

#21
fdeck said:
I've used Jamulus. During the pandemic, a friend of mine held a weekly jazz jam on Jamulus. Here's my experience. If the latency isn't extreme, your brain will automatically cause you to play your notes ahead of when you hear them, and a couple of players can actually sync with one another.

After all, this is how playing works anyway. You have to start a note before you expect it to come out of your instrument, e.g., just to be able to pull back on the string at the right time. Your brain takes care of this for you.

However, this only works if you're listening to the mix from your computer with headphones or earbuds that have good isolation. If you can hear the acoustic sound of your instrument and the sound from the mix at the same time, your brain will automatically lock to whatever comes first, and you will experience a powerful force causing the music to slow down.

For this reason, I was able to tolerate it when I was playing my electric bass with high quality headphones, but my upright bass, forget it. Likewise the people who were playing electric instruments such as keyboard did OK. Vocalists had it the worst.

It was also extremely difficult to get a bunch of musicians to understand the technical side of it, including the issue with isolation, and it just got so tiring to be the only guy holding the tempo, that it was not enjoyable. But I think a couple of people with electric instruments and a reasonable level of tech savvy should be able to do it.

We didn't try any of the other services, so I can't say how they compare.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, vocals would be tough. My office neighbor uses his speakers instead of headphones/ear buds when we're on a Webex (the same Webex, of course). If I'm talking and getting the feedback from his speakers, my brain shuts down and I can't talk any more, look like an idiot and have to yell at him for violating basic office etiquette. Heh.
 
#22
Live, not really. I mean, you might be able to jam a little and it might be a little sloppy and that could be fun, but it's not going to be like real playing.

I used to do voice lessons and she would accompany me on piano. It would sound fine to me, but to her I would always be behind... which she knew, so she could accurately know what i was singing was what i was hearing, and then i would record the tracks after using garageband for no latency. But live there are compromises.

You gotta remember like... even bluetooth is unacceptable latency for live music.
 
#23
Jamulus is close. Tried it with a friend. I had 200mb service and he had fiber. He said it was OK, but it's no good without fiber for sure. I hope to get fiber soon and revisit it.
 
#25
During pandemics I used Jamulus with friends and I have similar experience as @fdeck . It is feasible depending on the providers. We had from 20 to 70ms of latency, depending on the provider (and consider that 10ms is the delay you have when you play live with speakers at 3 meters from you).
After some exercise, you become used to (stable) latency, which is good, but might be a problem if you continuously switch from online to live (first time live after pandemics we were much faster than usual :) ). The most important thing is stability of the latency, obtainable by avoiding Wifi, and wireless headphones that add their own latency. Better to run a cable from router to computer. Isolation is another key issue, better to listen to the signal and not to the instrument (this might be hard for the drummer - ours used an electronic set).
Jamulus needs a server too (there are free instances). If you are only two, Sonobus does direct connection and latency should be lower.
 
#26
Has anyone tried under optimal circumstances?
Optimal could be: Living in the same city, using the same internet provider, which would possibly get you sub-10ms delays.
Network-wise, and with good sound hardware, this could get you 20ms delays, and thus should be workable.
 
#27
Assuming 100% efficiency, and taking the most direct route between Philadelphia and Munich… at speed of light it takes about 21ms one way. Cant go faster than that. No software or hardware can make that any faster.

And as per previous comments… todays internet is not 100% efficient, not even close. And it sure doesn’t take a direct route with no router delays or anything.
 
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#31
Another vote for JamKazam (if you have to use one) - used it with 4 members in our rehearsal room and 1 member (guitar and lead vocals) 1000 miles away. Wired (non-wifi) connection on both ends. We all wore headphones or earbuds to hear the distant player. Latency of 30 msec - no problem (with a little practice). 40 msec - definitely noticeable. 50 msec - very distracting. Usually we had between 30 and 40. What I discovered was that I was subconsciously trying to slow down to match the vocals, which in turn slowed down the vocalist. Best solution - just keep with the drummer. It was much better than no practice at all, but significantly more effort than 1 band in 1 room.
 
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#32
smatanovic said:
My cousin is a guitarist and when we got together last summer we really enjoyed playing together. Here's the rub: he lives in Munich, DE, and I in Philadelphia, in the US, and so getting together to play is not a thing that we can do very often. Does anyone know of a way to play together over the internet? We both have reliable/stable connections via our respective ISPs, but given the latency and compression I experience every day with the likes of Zoom/Teams/Facetime, those solutions doesn't really sound practicable.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
TLDR: No. It's not really possible unless you can find a way to send data faster than the speed of light.

The more detailed answer:
There will always be latency. Even if the data (your audio & video) travels at the speed of light, it takes time for it to go from your computer, through all the network switches, up to satellites, down to receivers, possibly up and down multiple times, or from satellite to satellite, through all the network switches again, and to your partner's computer. At the same time their data will be going through a similar network of cables and fiber and satellites back to you, and there's no guarantee it's going to be the same exact pathway in the opposite direction. So not only does it take time for each of your signals to get to each other, it might not be the same time. (And that's only if it's all happening at the speed of light. It doesn't.)

Even if it was controlled by a 3rd party server that gave everyone a unified click, that server would have to continuously figure how long each player's data takes round-trip, and then play the click offset for everyone so it arrives at everyone's computer so that the return data (the audio you're playing) arrives at the central server location at the same time. And even then, there will be latency because it would have to send the muxed audio back out again.

And none of that is taking into account the fact that sending data isn't a continuous stream of bits and bytes. It's sent in buffered packets.

So even in the most ideal situation it'll always be an issue of the time it takes to get everyone's data out & back + buffer size.

Back when i was getting my Masters during Covid i was in a sorta music-technology show & tell. One of the guest hosts was part of a team who developed a real-time remote-jam app. (I forget which one.) They basically said they were extremely frustrated because they basically got it as good at is was going to get, and there was still latency because of physics: speed of light + distance + how our internet infrastructure works.

Most humans can notice a latency of about 10ms-12ms. Some musicians have been measured to notice down to 6ms. Slight latencies can be adjusted for, especially with skill and practice. But some are too much to overcome. Especially because if you start compensating for it, it causes a ripple effect because everyone else is hearing your compensated audio at a different time and they have to compensate, and everyone is always compensating for everyone else's compensations.

--

Best bet is to just send each other files back and forth. It's not the same as playing together. But, it's better than nothing. And if you keep sending ideas back and forth, and tweaking them, and refining them, you're halfway to an album of original music.
 
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#33
Don't see a way to play live over the net.

I connected our studios to other rooms all around the world for remote sessions. The best was using ISDN lines, six of them, and hardware like Telos and APT. That was the most stable and we locked timecode from our ProTools. We used Source Connect at times with ProTools but that was not as good. I avoided any round trip audio.

There was even a bit of latency with "dark glass fiber " between two of our locations. Just hopping from one ISP to another for the connection was trouble.
 
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#34
The latency from my Mac to my WiFi router is 2-4ms, and 7-9ms from my Mac to my next hop router (Quantum Fiber in Aurora CO). Just getting around the Quantum, Lumen, and Level3 infrastructure in Denver gets me up to around 35-40ms. Even if I eliminated WiFi and worked only with local musicians, I wouldn't consider it usable. It'd be great for working out parts back and forth. But not for playing together at the same time.
 
#36
Here's something I learned about the latency when I was using Jamulus with my friends. We were all trying to figure out how to get the least latency. There's a Linux command "traceroute" that shows you how your data are routed from one computer to another. I learned that although I live a few blocks from the guy who was running the server, my packets were going halfway across the country and back, to get there. Far be it for me to suspect my ISP of playing games with my data, but it was annoying nonetheless.

Also, the speed of sound is just a little bit more than a foot per millisecond, so if you're playing in a band and are spaced out across a typical stage or practice room, you're already experiencing some latency. Now here's a really weird thing. My family goes to the local symphony concerts, and our seats are way up in the upper balcony. I know there's a lag, but when I watch the conductor carefully, it looks like he's in perfect time. I think my brain circuits are automatically making up the difference.
 
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#37
I did not notice the distance you need to cover: you will likely have more than 50ms latency. However, if for spending time together, it might be feasible after some training. You may easily test it by connecting to a Jamulus server in Germany.
 
#39
To put some of this in perspective,

At 120bpm, 250ms in latency is an 8th note delay. 125ms is a 16th note. The 30-50ms being mentioned is around 64th-32nd.

Also, keep in mind this is two way. If you play a note and it takes 125ms to reach them, it'll take another 125ms before you hear them play in response.
 
#40
fdeck said:
Also, the speed of sound is just a little bit more than a foot per millisecond, so if you're playing in a band and are spaced out across a typical stage or practice room, you're already experiencing some latency. Now here's a really weird thing. My family goes to the local symphony concerts, and our seats are way up in the upper balcony. I know there's a lag, but when I watch the conductor carefully, it looks like he's in perfect time. I think my brain circuits are automatically making up the difference.
Click to expand...
Being in the same room you have all the subtle visual and complex 3D sound information the human brain has evolved exceptionally well to extrapolate from and use to create the illusion of a shared perception of time. As convenient as remote real time playing would be I’ve resigned myself to it being too restricted by our current understanding of physics to be useful. Even if the hardware could make full use of the speed of light (which it can’t) the range would be much greater but latency would still be too high for a Paris/LA session to feel in the moment.
 

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