[SoulMate]

In this strange new reality we now live in, has someone tried rehearsing live with your bandmates online via e.g. JamKazam or other software? Providing you have a good 64-bit machine directly linked with Ethernet cable to you modem? You will probably also need an audio convertor (mic -> USB).

My band mates only live some 20 km away, so latency could be just manageable.

Anyone with experience on this topic?

 

[JohnInDenver]

Hello SoulMate. A friend and I did some testing with JamKazam. It is as you say: you need a pretty good machine and direct ethernet connection, not Wi-Fi, and also an audio interface. I have an inexpensive Alesis Multimix 6 USB audio interface and a Windows 10 laptop, and the JamKazam software gave it the thumbs-up as an acceptable hardware setup...once I plugged it into the router directly. I used one microphone for my saxophone and another for talking and of course headphones...all plugged into the Multimix 6. My friend played guitar and his wife sang a couple of jazz standards. We also were able to use backing tracks...JamKazam recognizes WAV files and will bring them in and play them for you. My friend lives 30 miles from me, and I would say there was no problem with latency. We even turned on our video cameras and added that to the network burden and it generally worked pretty smoothly. You can tell the software is still under development. Sometimes it freezes up, or maybe you make a wrong click and things go sideways. But it generally works. My friend said he had done some testing with an old band he had been in, and the more people (at different locations) they added, the worse it got. That makes sense I guess. But for two locations, like we did, it pretty much worked. But I have to say its pretty fiddly and I hope he doesn't want to do that frequently!

 

[SaxBass55]

I used Jamulus, similar setup under Windows 10 with a Mackie Onyx-2 interface. We played with a friend 3000 miles away in Canada and did not suffer latency issues.
A strange thing in Jamulus is that the sessions are open so people can jump in and out of the session. Most are quite courteous about asking if they can join. You have the option of muting them if desired.
If it helps, we found that dropping our own volume down seems to help the latency issue if present. It does NOT affect your ability to monitor yourself through your headphones if your interface has its own control. Put another way, your sound goes into your interface and comes back through the headphones to you without going through the computer, through the internet and back.
I don't believe that Jamulus has a means to play the WAV files. That is an advantage for JamKazam.

 

[SoulMate]

We had some successful sessions and some bad ones. All in all, not bad and better than not rehearsing.

 

[soybean]

These guys are playing together with no metronome, background track or overdubbing. They stay together really well. At the end they play fascinating rhythm and I've got rhythm at a fast tempo. Check it out.

 

[MM]

I am trying this approach with Jamulus. The nice thing with that program is you can see ping time and total round trip delay for different servers.

HOWEVER I think the only way to play such that that the sound mix is correctly synchronized for all band members is to listen to yourself in the mix on headphones and NOT to listen to yourself live and the others in the mix, and adjust timing such that you are all together. (I am making a first order assumption that everyone playing has the same delay, but this can be approximately true within a few ms when players live close together.) A difficulty is that the the round trip delay we can realize is of the order of 35-40ms, so the sounds we produce need to be initiated 35-40ms earlier from when we will hear them in the headphones. This is quite a long time to anticipate.

I understand low brass players, and probably contrabass sax players, need to normally anticipate a fair amount. Are there also significant lags in studio and concert headphone/in-ear monitors? (Probably nothing this long.)

Has anyone tried this sort of thing in remote rehearsing/jamming?

We may be able to reduce the round trip delay by installing a private server.

 

[rek]

Tried Jamulus with 3 others last night. Kinda worked. Our pianist was using a USB mic and had long latency. He really couldn't play with us, too far behind. Not so bad for the rest of us.

I installed a private server on my home machine, and even with a good connection the latency was too long.

Quite a few people report success, including a big band, so I'm going to give it another try after our pianist makes adjustments.