KVR Audio

tokolosh · Post by **tokolosh** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:24 pm

My friend and I are trying to make music together over the net .He lives in Tokyo and I don’t. We have tried to stream the audio from the output of my audio card to his computer over the net using MSN in real time. But the latency is too big as the bandwidth is too small. Do you know any smaller program (specific to audio only) that will steam audio in both ways and would take less bandwidth then MSN?

I have seen this plug-in

http://www.source-elements.com/

But my frind does not use protools

any ideas ?

fxe · Post by **fxe** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:33 pm

http://digitalmusician.net/

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:37 pm

I know there's a program designed to do this. It works by fixing the latency to precisely one bar at each end. You'll still be out of sync, but you'll be out of sync in a more musically useful way. Hopefully someone remembers its name...

R.A.W. · Post by **R.A.W.** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 10:33 pm

cron wrote:Hopefully someone remembers its name...

http://www.vstunnel.com

CC4 · Post by **CC4** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 10:58 pm

http://www.whohooo.warwickcompsoc.co.uk/inStep/

CC4 · Post by **CC4** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 11:17 pm

or

http://www.ninjam.com/
http://www.ejamming.com/

tokolosh · Post by **tokolosh** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:04 am

WOW

Thank you so much.

Wopelka · Post by **Wopelka** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 4:58 pm

ejamming seems pretty cool. did someone test it?

Rajah · Post by **Rajah** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:32 pm

And the winner is... the one with the Video. http://www.ejamming.com/ejammingmovie.html

fizbin · Post by **fizbin** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 11:11 pm

Unfortunately, I don't think that this will ever be possible with low enough latency to make it a satisfying musical event over the public Internet as we know it. All solutions suffer from the same problem. I hit the snare and you hear it a fraction of a second later. Guitar player plays in synch to that perhaps, but then the drummer hears the guitar player well after he hit the snare.

fizbin

spuddle · Post by **spuddle** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 11:29 pm

Well ninjam overcomes that by delaying everyone by one bar so that it can sync up in the end. As long as you play to the tempo and have your game together its possible.

Bunnyboy · Post by **Bunnyboy** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 11:52 pm

hopefully tommo will chip in as he does this

mindless · Post by **mindless** » Wed Nov 02, 2005 12:09 am

fizbin wrote: I don't think that this will ever be possible

EVER??? Like NEVER??? Surely you jest?

mindless · Post by **mindless** » Wed Nov 02, 2005 12:11 am

spuddle wrote:Well ninjam overcomes that by delaying everyone by one bar so that it can sync up in the end. As long as you play to the tempo and have your game together its possible.

That's not really jamming then...is it? Sounds like something everyone has to agree on ahead of time.

AdmiralQuality · Post by **AdmiralQuality** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 9:07 am

SK-1 wrote:
fizbin wrote: I don't think that this will ever be possible
EVER??? Like NEVER??? Surely you jest?

The fastest form of data transmission to my imaginary friend in Japan is transoceanic fiber optic cable.

The speed of light in a fiber is slower than that in a vacuum, but let's take the speed of light in vacuum: 670,616,629.38 miles per hour, and the circumference of the Earth: 24,901 miles -- half of which is the distance to the furthest possible point from me -- 12,450 miles. It therefore takes the fastest possible signal 0.13367 seconds to get to my friend. A little over a tenth of a second. While that's OK for a telephone conversation, it's too long for musical sync. (And his signal has to get back to me, so thats another tenth of a second to wait!)

Try setting your DAW's latency (buffer size) to 133 milliseconds and try playing a softsynth and you'll see how even a seemingly short delay makes it nearly impossibly to play. And in reality, that number is even longer as light is slower in a fiber than in vacuum.

And communicating through vacuum -- through radio via a geostationary satellite -- won't help any, as they orbit 22,223 miles above the Earth, the trip to satellite and bounce back to a friend right beside me would be at least 44,446 miles, and to one on the other side of the world even further. At least 5 times longer than the trip under the ocean.

I notice the delay on my music system and it's only about a 12 ms *round trip*. Thats 0.012 seconds, or about a twentieth the time of a trip round Earth at light speed.

So, until someone discovers hyperspace, super luminal travel, wormholes, subspace radio, or something... we'll NEVER be able to jam properly with our friend on the other side of the planet. Sad but true.

And yes, you can jam a bar apart and sync it that way, but... what if you want to change to another chord? There's no way we can both change at the same time and both hear each other change (unless we're a whole repeating-phrase length apart... but then what if we want to change to a different pattern, or a pattern of a different number of bars? It just won't work.)

So you can jam on one chord, and hear the delayed version of what your friend played during the previous bar a few seconds ago. But that's about it.

They did this on TV a while back, for the Olympics I think? But only the audience saw it in sync. The separate performances in different locations around the world happened synced to click tracks. Or possibly it could work in a cascade where the first location hears nobody but click track, the 2nd hears the 1st, the 3rd location hears the 1st and 2nd re-synced, and so on... This way you could have a live audience at the last location see their orchestra perform seemingly in sync with all the other incoming "live" feeds. But only the last location in the chain would experience it that way.

Making music together over the internet.