Playing with others live via computer

[Harpcat]

How does one utilize a computer link to play live with others? I assume there are multiple ways to accomplish this. Obviously, I’m not super literate when it comes to computers so, please, keep it as simple as you can.
Thanks in advance!

[Burgerbob]

To play live?

There's really no way. Latency (or the time between someone doing something, and you hearing it) is a factor we just can't get around. Even at the speed of light, someone a few hundred miles away will have noticeable latency. Quite enough to notice when playing something as time-important as music. And of course we're not even dealing with light speed communication, much slower.

[andym]

One solution is soundjack.eu. It is slightly complex to setup but can get good latency results of 80 to 100 milliseconds across the US and 40 msec across a smaller region. Note that a 1 msec is equivalent to being about 1 foot apart in a room. You are limited to 8 people, I think. Also, use an Ethernet cable rather than WiFi. The latency isn’t horrible in WiFi but it varies a lot. I think there are some other solutions too. Just don’t expect zoom to work. General video conferencing softaware just isn’t designed for music.

[andym]

BTW, the speed of light delay at 300 miles is 1.6 milliseconds. You have greater sound latency with your section mate who is in the next seat, unless you are sitting really tightly together. The greatest distance on Earth (half the circumference) has a speed of light delay of 77 msec and is approximately equivalent to the sound delay between the opposite sides of a large orchestral stage.

The internet latency is largely about software and hardware delays.

[PVH]

It is possible. I have done it. It can work rather well.

It isn’t necessarily easy though. I have used both JackTrip and Jamulus and JackTrip is significantly better (although more complicated to use.) I have been trying to learn more about how this works and from what I understand the software uses a different method of communicating data packets over the internet than most communication. They use a method that doesn’t confirm that all of the data arrives all of the time. Bad for email - good for improving latency for live sound to a point. There are geographical limitations for synchronous performance but much depends on the quality of the network connection.

To even begin to explore this you will need the following

A Computer (not iPad or phone) I have read that this is possible with a Raspberry Pi but I haven’t tried it.
A wired connection to the internet (no wifi)
A sound card/audio interface
An XLR microphone that goes into the audio interface

The best place to start would be the website of trombonist Michael Dessen. There is a huge amount of information in documents and video here that helped me get started. (Listen to the duet he plays in the 4th video - he sounds awesome!)

https://mdessen.com/portfolio/networked ... resources/

There is a free online course offered by Chris Chafe of Stanford University who wrote JackTrip.

https://www.kadenze.com/courses/online- ... ogy-x/info

[harrisonreed]

Wait until quantums come out from Intel.

[andym]

Thanks, PVH. I may experiment with the ones you posted.