Skype jamming/recording...is this possible??

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adventureboy

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Maybe somebody knows, or maybe it's a mad idea. so here goes. I want to record some live acoustic sessions, me and my partner both have mics and acoustics, preamps and we use Cubase as a DAW.
I was thinking, if we both have two laptops each in different UK locations...laptop 1 is running Cubase recording from the mics via preamp as normal. Laptop 2 is running Skype so we can jam 'realtime', merely monitoring, whilst the other laptop does the recording. I'm thinking we could then run a line out feed from the preamps direct into Skype so we would effectively be hearing each others preamp on our headphones... My pertner would then fileshare me their WAV file from their end when we're finished and I can mix them with mine in Cubase. Has anybody tried this or knows if it would work.
I'm thinking if Skype is in realtime it should work in theory? :confused:
 
It's all great until the last sentence; Skype won't be in realtime.

Give your pal a call and try to sing something with him. That should tell you what the delay is like.
 
Yep....latency......will......be........a..........problem.
 
I suspect that latency would be a problem, not only for Skype, but for any transmission system given the amount of transcoding and routing involved. I tried to find a way to do this a few years ago but, short of dedicated lines, there was really nothing that was practical. My writing partner and I just exchange wav and mp3 files.
 
thanks for the replies. looks like filesharing will continue :)
 
Seidy said:
Hmm I have never tried, but there are online DAW's for collabing. First one coming to mind: Ohm Studio
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Greg_L said:
Ninjam...
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I just looked at both of these.

Ninjam isn't really realtime -- it deals with latency by increasing it.

Ohm Studio claims to be, though it's simply not possible. For example, this morning, latency between my system and homerecording.com is 149 ms, or .15 seconds. Double that to account for two people playing together and you have just under 1/3 of a second, far too much to allow two musicians to jam in real time. The human ear can detect a discrepancy in timing (aka "temporal resolution") of as little as 2 ms. A 300 ms discrepancy would give new meaning to the term "back beat." :) Ohm Studio is a collaborative DAW, but it is not one that can be used real time by multiple musicians; it's more analogous to what I do with my writing partner when we write lyrics together: we have a common document open in Google Drive and each can edit it -- we each see the other's edits more or less as they are made, and Google Drive saves the document automatically. We're collaborating on the same documents, but there is still latency so, though it feels like real time, it really isn't.

In short, you're not going to be able to jam in real time with Ohm Studio.

There are other problems with Ohm Studio, however, that go beyond what is otherwise a rather clever piece of programming. Ohm Studio is part music tool, part social networking site. As I understand it, it is not possible to have a private session -- each collaboration is open to all members of Ohm Studio to hear. That may not bother some people, but it would definitely bother me. When I compose or collaborate with my writing partner, it's not a public performance. The end result may be, but definitely not the working process to get to the end product.

Finally, Ohm Studio raises a lot of legal issues with respect to copyright ownership. When you collaborate with someone on a musical piece, the law regards the resulting product as a work of joint authorship -- all collaborators "own" and undivided interest in the musical work. NEVER collaborate with someone BEFORE you've worked out, in a writing, who owns what and what consents are necessary to do anything with the jointly-authored piece of music.

Worse still, it is possible (I say "possible" only because I'm unaware of any case law addressing this situation) that placing a work on Ohm Studio constitutes "publication." The date of first publication has significance in copyright law and may result in a limitation on enforceable rights in the work or, in some circumstances, complete waiver of ALL rights.

In short, if you're just doing it for fun and never intend to do anything with your music, and don't care if someone else rips it off and exploits it as their own, the Ohm Studio provides a way to work with in the same DAW at the same time, though not in real time.

I don't know what the OP is looking for, but neither Ninjam nor Ohm Studio offer any advantage over Skype for the way I work with my writing partner. YMMV.
 
Anything using IP technology for live jamming will be doomed to failure. It's not anything close to real time--that's the whole principle of the Internet.
 
Bobbsy said:
Anything using IP technology for live jamming will be doomed to failure. It's not anything close to real time--that's the whole principle of the Internet.
Click to expand...

Or maybe it will spawn a new stylee of really weird soundz?

Go with it, man. I reckon the funky delay effect could become the next big thing...
 
A while back a mate asked me to go through some music theory with him to refresh his memory. As we live 200 miles apart skype seemed like the best idea. Most of what we did was just screen sharing and chatting which was wonderful. We then tried jamming over skype to put some theory into practice and that's where it fell apart. Here's where it got weird; his end was fine, and i mean flawless! However, my end was screwed! Every time i played his part would drop out of my headphones. I have little or no understanding of how the magical internets actually works, but the bizarre thing with this was my internet connection is very good whereas his is very, very shoddy. We tried a couple of different things (no video, just voice chat, both plugged in via ethernet cables rather than wireless etc) but nothing seemed to solve the problem.

Long story short, for jamming my experience has been that is just won't work.
 
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