bitflipper Posted June 3, 2020 Share Posted June 3, 2020 When the quarantine went into effect, it didn't impact me all that much. Sure, it killed my business, but to be honest it's been a nice vacation. Yeh, gigs and band rehearsals went away, but that just meant I could focus on recording again. More time for reading and getting my blood pressure up watching political YouTube videos. But some of my bandmates were going stir crazy. Our singer, well, being a singer is what she lives for. She begged me to find a way for us to practice/jam online. We held a Zoom meeting during which I gave a lecture on how networks work and why real-time anything is impossible over the internet. To appease her, we did a singalong. And yup, it went exactly as you'd expect. Especially when the drummer joined in on cajone. Cacophony ensued, of course. But then this past weekend I got a call from a buddy of mine who'd been experimenting with Jamkazam. He swore it really worked, so I installed it and agreed to give it a go. To my amazement, it really did work. Well, after considerable hair-pulling (metaphorically speaking, as I currently have none to pull) we got it more or less working. The developer is struggling to keep up with the sudden popularity. Their server has crashed or become unresponsive many times. The software is 1.0 and looks it. But the core design is good. You can start a jam session as a private experiment, as an anyone-can-join open invitation, or as an invitation-only session. It's reminiscent of online gaming in that you get a list of open sessions, can see their network latencies (what gamers would see on their lists as "ping times"), pick one that's got reasonable response times and jump in. Choose wisely, because the session's overall latency is constrained by the slowest participant. Yes, there's video, so put on your pants first. I'm still experimenting, but am optimistic. Setup can be a bear. I won't go into the details, except to say that once everything's configured for Jamkazam my computer is essentially useless for anything else. At least I was able to do some housekeeping, vacuuming away years of cobwebs from behind my rack. Please don't try Jamkazam. You're only going to slow me down. But if you're already using it, I'd like to hear about your experiences. Here's a YouTube livestream from last Saturday that shows how cool it is when it works: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigb Posted June 3, 2020 Share Posted June 3, 2020 Forward to 3:52:00 if you want to see Dave! 🙂 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starise Posted June 5, 2020 Share Posted June 5, 2020 Looks like issues with the keyboard audio. That's Dave? Doesn't look anything like his pic here to me. You sure? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Carpenter Posted June 5, 2020 Share Posted June 5, 2020 I tried this several weeks or so ago, I have 8ms latency and 350/35Mbps connection. I expected issues with a lot of people, Sadly that's what I got, BUT!, there are some great people on there, and I hope it will develop more and get amazing along with those on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitflipper Posted June 5, 2020 Author Share Posted June 5, 2020 Starise was joking, that ain't me. One reason I can be sure it isn't me is that I have yet to get Jamkazam functioning properly. It's 1.0 software. Pretty rough around the edges. Surprising, given that it's been around since 2014. Yesterday I decided to play around with routing in my interface, wanting to switch which outputs were being sent to Jamkazam. But when I attempted to change the output channels, instead of modifying the setting it added two more channels. And then complained that I could only have 2 - and gave no way to remove them. To add further insult, when I clicked CANCEL it complained again and refused to close the dialog. Then I tried re-running the setup wizard in hopes of getting everything back to defaults, but it told me I couldn't do that with an open session. But I couldn't close the session because the port-selection dialog that wouldn't close was covering up the main window. I was caught in a Mobius strip of bad programming. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigb Posted June 5, 2020 Share Posted June 5, 2020 To be fair, that was me saying it was you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitflipper Posted June 6, 2020 Author Share Posted June 6, 2020 Well, I finally got Jamkazam working properly and tested it last night with a bass player and a guitarist. And a drum machine. Thank goodness for the drum machine. I was getting 2.9ms, but the guitarist was contending with such long latencies (~80ms) that the only way I could stay in time was to not listen to him. The bass player was off, too, but he had no technical excuse because he was the one hosting the drum machine. What has turned me off the whole thing, though, was the horrid audio quality. I was expecting something akin to streaming audio at 128 kb/s, but it was far worse than that. It was tinny and had a lot of chirpy aliasing going on. The experience was not pleasant, didn't feel natural, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the guitarist announced that he had to leave the session. Better than nothing? Um, I have a drum machine of my own. And a capable multi-track DAW. So no, for me it was not better than nothing. Oh, and apologies to Starise for the mis-attribution. In the future I will err on the side of statistical probability and just blame Craig by default. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BassDaddy Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 Too bad it didn't pan out. The pants thing was a deal breaker for me anyway. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InstrEd Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 Maybe when Musk gets his satellites in low orbit we will get low latency for audio. Now I have now idea what I just said so carry on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wibbles Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 4 hours ago, bitflipper said: just blame Craig by default Wise words indeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wibbles Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 1 hour ago, InstrEd said: Maybe when Musk gets his satellites in low orbit we will get low latency for audio. He's such a knob end that if I ever met him, I'd want to kick him so hard that I'd put his satellites into low orbit. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
InstrEd Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 38 minutes ago, Wibbles said: He's such a knob end that if I ever met him, I'd want to kick him so hard that I'd put his satellites into low orbit. Och! At least pack them in some of your wool to soften the blow 😆 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wibbles Posted June 6, 2020 Share Posted June 6, 2020 29 minutes ago, InstrEd said: Och! At least pack them in some of your wool to soften the blow 😆 I'm pretty sure I'd want him to feel the full effect. But then Wibbles don't do violence. However, I would explain this to him at such excruciating length, that he'd wished that I had kicked him in the trouser region and been done with it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starise Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 No worries Dave...I frequent a paid service that augments some of my violin training. They have a forum there. Someone asked if we knew of any online service that could allow a live playing experience. A few of the players tried Jamkazam with little success. Though I'll admit, the video you posted made it look very appealing. Seems to be working for a few. My internet connection at home is decent. I don't pay for the skunk works version. If the total success is dependent on the slowest connection in the group I'm probably screwed. Most musicians I know are far from tech literate and probably don't have a clue as to how to max their systems. I don't intend that statement to be derogatory. Just the way things are. Don't get me wrong. I doubt Bill Gates would hire me as a custodian. I know enough to get by when it comes to servers, routers, internet connections etc. I can put computers together whoopee. Obviously now would be a good time for someone to rake some $$ in if they could come up with an idea to make the process work better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bitflipper Posted June 8, 2020 Author Share Posted June 8, 2020 Unfortunately, that would require re-inventing the fundamental design of packet-based networks. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craigb Posted June 9, 2020 Share Posted June 9, 2020 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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