online realtime jamming?

Secret Clubhous

New member
I'm posting this here cuz I don't know where else to post it, but I figured if anyone would be into something like this they might hang out here...

So, does anybody know of a reliable, non-latency-ridden means of jamming w/someone else in another city (or country, for that matter) in realtime via the internet? I am talking audio, not just MIDI.

I know of people who've been developing this technology but haven't heard anything from anyone who has actually successfully tried it yet. What would be needed to do this? Although I've heard of this happening at certain public venues, I wonder if this technology is available for the home?

My music partner moved across country & we're trying to find anything that works--maybe even some kind of conference-call speaker phone system?
closed-circuit TV? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

We already tried telepathy but at this distance it needs a mightly powerful pre.... :D
 
This could probably be done if you both had ISDN connection. Used all the time for video conferencing and commonly in the voice over industry.

This, however, isn't exactly cheap, and I'm not entirely sure if the latency is to the point where you could have a productive jam session or not.

Another option that's just kinda' getting off the ground is this pro tools plugin called Source Connect ( www.source-connect.com ) . Again, I'm not entirely certain about the latency on this one either, but I did attend a demo of the product, and at the time it seemed like it could have been low enough but I never personally got a chance to try it out unfortunately.

.
 
You'd have to have one hell of a connection methinks, both up and down to get no latency... Alot of video confrencing audio is run through codecs that compress the crap outta the audio therefore leaving not alot of quality, and they still have latency problems... Got a 10Mbps asyncronous connection? :eek:
 
On another note, I used to direct-in my guitar and play to my family over Teamspeak at one point, and it wasnt too bad quality... But that wasnt against other people playing and trying to keep in time ;)
 
I know with playing games, that a good low latency connection is considered to be around 50-65 milliseconds. The fastest I have ever personally experienced for a useable length of time (using a T3) was about 37ms. More common and still considered decently fast is around 70-80ms.
 
Used to work at a place that had Four T-3 lines, direct fiber optic connection... I'm talking MAJOR speed and bandwidth... If you tried to connect 2 computers to a streaming audio connection, you'd have a double slap of sound.. Up to a second or better at times... Once connected and streaming, the delay wouldn't change unless you reset the connection or it had to re-buffer... This was a couple of years back though...

About the same time when Voice over IP (Netmeeting) was just starting to take off, if you had a full duplex sound cards and was talking to someone, you could hear an echo of yourself... That shows a good bit of latency there.. But once again that was several years back..

Interesting concept idea though...

--
Rob
 
Oh well, sounds like it's beyond our reach at this point...

so what's a quick-n-dirty solution? Would any particular kind of speaker phone/headset setup do the job? I'm not expecting high quality sound here, just the ability to hear & play at the same time.

We tried this one night over the phone: She used a headset w/a cell phone & played. It didn't work on her end; sound kept cutting in & out. I used a headset w/a land line & though it sounded cheesey, I could hear her & play along simultaneously.
 
from the guitarportal.net FAQ:

*Real Time Audio - to be used with the chat program. This feature will allow members to play in real time for other members to hear.
 
altitude909 said:
Even a phone call would have really poor latency I doubt anything exisits

We can ignore the processing latency in the computers at both ends for the purpose of this question. We can also ignore the router delays at each hop along the way. Why can we ignore these? Because even if they are all zero, this can't possibly work in any usable fashion over more than a relatively short distance.

The laws of physics provide the biggest limitation. The latency of routing a signal via a satellite hop, electronic delay notwithstanding, is currently about 240-279ms, with 240ms being at the equator directly under the bird, 279 being at the edge of the ground footprint of the satellite. That's a quarter second. (As an aside, this is the reason that for web browsing and other semi-interactive computing, satellite internet, despite its relatively high bandwidth, is still, on the average, slower than dialup.)

The amount of time for a wire hop halfway around the world is 133 ms, or over an eighth of a second. This is all at the speed of light we're talking about---again, we're ignoring another 20 ms at each end plus a few ms at each hop along the way, plus additional delays for repeaters along long signal lines where needed, plus the fact that the speed of light in copper is a fair bit slower than the speed of light in a vaccum, etc.

Real-time jamming within a state or European-sized country might be moderately practical. Within the bounds of something the size of the U.S. is barely within the realm of possibility, if that. Jamming arbitrarily across the 'net as a whole would be fundamentally impossible within the laws of physics as we know them, theoretical physics like wormholes notwithstanding....
 
This has always been a dream of mine being able to achieve a digital "room" where people could log in and play together, but as you stated, latency is a big issue, all you can do is compress the quality of the sound, try and work most of the processing locally on your machine, so what actually gets sent over is the DI sound. We ain't there yet as far as i know.. but we are getting to a point where this will be totally possible in the near future.
 
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