Jam together over the Internet

sumppi · Post by **sumppi** » 14/10/2005 - 17:53

Check out http://www.ejamming.com - it's a cool little software that allows networked playing similar to online gaming. Beta is out for the Mac now and soon for the Windows XP.

I tried it with one of the company's PR people that helped me set it up earlier this week, it took some tinkering but eventually it worked nicely. We were able to sync the playing pretty ok even though the other guy was in the USA and I was in Finland. In general the latency to east coast was 100ms and to the west coast about 110ms, which was still pretty tolerable.

Another nice thing about it was that I was able to route the MIDI information straight to Logic, so I could record and use the material produced in the jam session immediately. The downside is that it doesn't provide any GM synth yet, so I had to route the MIDI data from the network to Logic anyway.

All in all it's a fun thing and makes me really want to get a MIDI equipped guitar. I tried one last year in the States, but didn't get it back then.

Sumppi

Driller · Post by **Driller** » 14/10/2005 - 21:02

That sounds cool, unfortunately my guitar playing ability is shit! Nice idea though

sumppi · Post by **sumppi** » 14/10/2005 - 21:09

Driller wrote:That sounds cool, unfortunately my guitar playing ability is shit! Nice idea though

Well, it's MIDI so pretty much any keyboard will do anyway

Sumppi

Driller · Post by **Driller** » 14/10/2005 - 21:45

Trust me - my guitar playing ability is FAR FAR better than my keyboard skills

I can play three chords on the keyboard and that's about it (apart from the main piano part of Tubular Bells)

Matrix · Post by **Matrix** » 15/10/2005 - 0:14

I think SID80's could use this to major effect for more practice time instead of having a rather unfair 1 days run through before a performance.

DHS · Post by **DHS** » 15/10/2005 - 11:32

COOOLIO!

Joining soon!

sumppi · Post by **sumppi** » 15/10/2005 - 11:43

DHS wrote:COOOLIO!

Joining soon!

I just talked to the PR guy, they will release the XP preview version tomorrow if everything goes according to plans.

DHS, we have to try this when you get it set up

Sumppi

DHS · Post by **DHS** » 15/10/2005 - 12:08

In fact i registered, they say "push the download link" and instead of it a nice "coming soon"

zerozillion · Post by **zerozillion** » 11/11/2005 - 14:30

what about this thing?

http://www.phone-jam.com/

sumppi · Post by **sumppi** » 11/11/2005 - 14:52

zerozillion wrote:what about this thing?

http://www.phone-jam.com/

I think correct answer to that question would be "no".

Sumppi

Romeo Knight · Post by **Romeo Knight** » 12/11/2005 - 13:09

Then what about http://www.digitalmusician.net or http://www.ninjam.com?

MIDI and Audio!

sumppi · Post by **sumppi** » 12/11/2005 - 13:43

Romeo Knight wrote:Then what about http://www.digitalmusician.net or

I tried hard to look for anything of substance in that site, but all I got was a load of marketing crap about bringing the world together

But if I understood correctly it works pretty much like the long gone Rocket Network which wasn't realtime.

Romeo Knight wrote:www.ninjam.com?

Not realtime either and the concept of playing one bar behind everyone else is weird. Not to mention the awful user interface

I actually use just plain (not-so-old) Skype occasionally with the vocalist for testing out ideas. I play the acoustic and he tries to sing something over it. The problem is that while he sings in sync with my audio, it's already about 200ms late at that point and when his vocals make it back to me it's about 400-500ms late. So it basically works only if I play to my own sync and don't listen to his singing at all.

As for other music networking concepts, I outlined some ideas in a posting two years ago: http://www.bigbluelounge.com/forums/vie ... php?t=4784 - naturally, pretty much one of those concepts besides the MIDI (and some of the non-RT audio) stuff have been realised by the clueless developers, as always. I guess it'll take some 3-5 more years to get anything really useful and especially easy to use out there.

Sumppi

Romeo Knight · Post by **Romeo Knight** » 14/11/2005 - 9:19

sumppi wrote:
Romeo Knight wrote:Then what about http://www.digitalmusician.net or
I tried hard to look for anything of substance in that site, but all I got was a load of marketing crap about bringing the world together But if I understood correctly it works pretty much like the long gone Rocket Network which wasn't realtime.

What does realtime mean? As long as you use the internet you have to live with delays in any case. Digital Musician works (I've tested it) and has 2 big advantages compared to skype: You can use it as a VST plugin and it has a decent constant (!) sound quality, comparable to a mp3 128 kbps.
You just have to pay if you wanna use higher rates.

So at least you could use the takes of your singer in the real mix after not listening to him!

sumppi · Post by **sumppi** » 14/11/2005 - 10:26

Romeo Knight wrote:What does realtime mean? As long as you use the internet you have to live with delays in any case.

In this case realtime means that you can actually play together at the same time, and that requires latencies of under 100ms to be reasonable.

Romeo Knight wrote:Digital Musician works (I've tested it) and has 2 big advantages compared to skype: You can use it as a VST plugin and it has a decent constant (!) sound quality, comparable to a mp3 128 kbps.
You just have to pay if you wanna use higher rates.
So at least you could use the takes of your singer in the real mix after not listening to him!

Well, it's compressed in the end anyway, so it's not really that useful for production use, although I'm not saying it doesn't have it's place

Sumppi

beyond · Post by **beyond** » 14/11/2005 - 10:55

I would say, in terms of jamming, latency must not exceed 10 milliseconds. And if this is not a constant latency it must be impossible to play to/intolerable to listen to

100 ms is a lot compared to the length of one beat, in general.