Jammin online

Phil

Hi all, anyone know of a way to jam online with my buddies, seeing as we're all stuck home in isolation?

Cheers

Phil

MichaelHorowitz

Hi Phil,

I’m looking into trying this:

https://www.jamkazam.com/

l’ll let you know how it goes...

m

Phil

Thanks Michael...all the best, Phil

Buco

Jamkazam works well as long as there's no great distance between participants and your signal doesn't have to hop between many servers. I tried it years ago with @Scoredog and it wasn't a total disaster but there was enough latency to where we couldn't get the perfect sync between us, he would count 123 and we would both clap on 4 and my clap was a touch behind his. He's on the West coast and I was in Chicago at the time. They have a metronome tool that's supposed to help with small latencies but we didn't try it. Also the interface they made is designed for the lowest latency.

djangology

Hey Phil, I hope things are going good. I don't see you around often. :-)

We tried online jam using Jamtaba, but didn't work so well. I don't think it would be really possible.

If the software you used, somehow knew how to calculate the latency on the line and then adjust the jam track playing on both computers sychronized, then I would imagine you could cut latency in half because then you only have the outgoing latency and not the entire round-trip.

There must be something like that out there. I think Ninjam may be the closest thing to it. Both Jamtaba and Ninjam work in Reaper DAW.

Before you do it, get your IP on the net by typing what is my ip into Google. Then, send that IP to your friend and have them run a ping to their machine. For example:

13:06 $ ping 8.8.8.8

PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=25.820 ms

What you want is to be under 10ms, but under 6ms would be ideal.

Phil

Hi Jon, good to hear from you! Thanks for the reply. I'll check out your suggestion.

Take care

Cheers Phil

MichaelHorowitz

I tried having a rehearsal with my band via Jamkazam last night. It's pretty easy to setup and connect with others. I have digtal mic pre so I was able to use a very nice Neumann mic which sounded great in Jamkazam. My violinist used an old Windows 7 laptop with a crappy built-in mic. It didn't sound great, but was adequate.

We all live within a 1/4 mile of each other (although are not all on the same ISP) and while we could play together, there was still some noticeable latency (in 12ms-24ms range.) The thing is, it's not consistent so sometimes everything is perfectly synced but just a second later it will be slightly off again. It was never so bad that you couldn't get through a song and have some fun, so it's useful for running down tunes in a rough form or just for jamming. However, due to the latency issue, it doesn't allow for critical, hyper accurate playing.

klaatu

I can tell you that zoom does not work. It is designed for conference calls, and it mutes all but the loudest input. We could not find a way to prevent that, and even when some sound came through from others there seemed to be some delay.

Jamkazam might work for us, we are all within about 80 clicks of each other. Will report back in after we've tried it. One issue with it is that it only works on Macs or Windows devices, not IOS.

flaco

Some people on theSession.org figured out a setting that helps with Zoom audio quality:

“If you click the arrow beside the mute button, then “audio settings” the “advanced” there’s an option called “show original sound option” (or similar)

Tick this and a button will always display in the top left of zoom saying “turn on original sound” or “turn off original sound”.

Make sure all users have it set to “turn off original sound” (which confusingly means Original Sound is on!)

This removes all the audio wizardry zoom uses to make speech sound good on video conferences (remove high pitch noises, suppress background noise etc) and the instruments hence sound much better, especially high pitch notes.”

klaatu

Our problem was not with audio quality, it was that only one person was audible at a time - zoom seemed to mue all except the loudest participant. We did make that "original sound" change, and it had no effect on that issue.

Will be trying jamkazam. One of my friends thinks the Toronto Symphony uses it. I'll report back on our experience.

klaatu

Well, so much for that. JamKazam only works on Macs or Windows, not on any IOS devices. One of our crew has a PC that lacks a microphone and a camera, so we are out of luck.