LinuxMusicians

Real time musicking via peer-to-peer and server timed services has transformed my online music life this last month.

I'll drop some examples below as they pop up on my screen.

@khz listed a round-up about a year ago here:

khz wrote: ↑Sun Jun 28, 2020 5:36 am

and @Rainmak3r presented his research into low latency WebRTC over here:

Rainmak3r wrote: ↑Thu Jun 11, 2020 4:11 pm

https://jamulus.io/wiki/Getting-Started (GPL) is server based. You fire up a client and connect to public servers as advertised on https://explorer.jamulus.io/ or a private one with your friends.

Most public servers are public ad lib jams. There are a few more organized ones like this one from London each Wed. night.
This is taken from their messages in the chat client inside Jamulus:

"MYH Jamming Group.
Meet every Wednesday from 8pm to jam with friends.
Soul and Funk group that used to meet in a bar in London and now we meet online."

"Message from listener MYH HOST - Shay: Tonight’s set list:
• September - Earth Wind and Fire • Tedeschi Trucks Band - "Midnight in Harlem" • Play That Funky Music - Wild Cherry • I'll Take You There - Staple Singers • Billie Jean - Micheal Jackson • Soul Man - Sam & Dave • Shake your Booty - KC & the Sunshine band • Sitting on the Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding • Gone Under Snarky Puppy ft Shayna Steele • The Ghetto - Donny Hathaway • A Testa In Giù - Pino Daniele • Lovely Day - Bill Withers • Gettin' In the Way - Jill Scott • Diggin' on James Brown - Tower of Power • All Night Long - Mary J B • All I Do - Stevie Wonder"

Here's a bootleg of the first hour that https://youtu.be/U623suYOOBs algo bots may or may not block in your country.
Here's the mp4 file (150mb) for the extra curious: https://nextcloud.webo.hosting/s/mrwJqX5BperTiXR

Plenty of nice Jamulus presentations and demos online, here's a video list filtered by # of views:
https://invidious.tube/search?q=Jamulus ... ews&page=1

Here's a bootleg with a lot of hopping between Jamulus servers one dark and stormy winter's night not that long ago:

Fmajor7add9 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 6:15 pm https://youtu.be/dxTE3rEPils

From
https://help.jacktrip.org/hc/en-us/arti ... troduction

JackTrip is a free, open source program authored in the early 2000s by Chris Chafe, Juan Pablo Caceres and CCRMA at Stanford University.

It allows musicians to play with one another across thousands of miles using bidirectional, multi-channel, lossless audio and with very low total latency, enabling real-time musical collaboration over the internet.

By real-time, we are referring to a one-way latency of 25-30 milliseconds or less between two geographically separated locations. Research indicates that at this latency or less, musicians can play together with no significant synchrony problems.

Many musicians use JackTrip because it was made for professional-quality sound and low latency, because it works with existing hardware and does not require any financial investment, and because its developers and users have created a supportive community around it.

What JackTrip does is to connect two or more computers – either in the same room or across the planet – that are both running JACK, enabling them to send/receive audio.

JACK and JackTrip work on Linux, MacOSX and Windows, including the option to use a machine on any of those platforms to connect with any of the others.

JackTrip has been developing for many years, but the user and developer community expanded significantly during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, when musicians needed options for performing together from home. This increase in activity has led to many exciting and upcoming developments including a web application for use with inexpensive Raspberry Pi devices, a "hub mode" designed for large ensembles, and a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to simplify the user experience.

Christian McBride and NPRs Jazz Night in America featured JackTrip in a nice video feat. pianist and composer Dan Tepfer and trombonist Michael Dessen: https://invidiou.site/watch?v=Sj6Ij1Oxe1s

and brass quartet The Westerlies shares its experiences in this All Things Considered segment:
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/21/93704305 ... her-online

Thanks for the mention and for this post! It's helpful to have a place to discuss all this.

I'm actually in the process of writing a README for the super-ugly WebRTC based prototype I suggested during my FOSDEM talk. I think I'll push the code on a repo later today, so that people can start playing with it. I'm still not happy with how it currently works, but hopefully with other eyes we'll get somewhere

Rainmak3r wrote: ↑Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:26 pm Thanks for the mention and for this post! It's helpful to have a place to discuss all this.

I'm actually in the process of writing a README for the super-ugly WebRTC based prototype I suggested during my FOSDEM talk. I think I'll push the code on a repo later today, so that people can start playing with it. I'm still not happy with how it currently works, but hopefully with other eyes we'll get somewhere

As anticipated, I just pushed the code I've written so far to a repo: https://github.com/lminiero/jamrtc
I've tried to document as much as possible in the README, so that should provide enough background on motivation, architecture, how it works (or is supposed to), etc. It's not really usable for playing right now (latency still too high), but now that it's out there hopefully people will get interested and tinker with the code to help improve it.

https://github.com/wahjam/wahjam, https://github.com/wahjam/wahjam/wiki

This came up during our A linux musician's video meeting? talk. Say you're jamming away in reasonable sync while having a video feed open in something like jitsi. The video requires much higher bandwidth than audio so if you're depending on visual cues the latency between image and sound will be an issue. This is critical for choirs and orchestras why many of them are working on a solution to bridge the gap.

Then this appeared on my screen today courtesy of BABS - British Association of Barbershop Singers (yes a real thing, not fake agents)

Grand Central Chorus has managed to decrease the gap by trimming their jitsi server. Details discussed at https://www.facebook.com/groups/jamulus ... 1686609396.

From the choir's write-up in the link above:
"We were thrilled to have nearly 40 of us all able to sing together for the first time since March! Just hearing the chorus hold a four-part chord on an ‘Ah’ was a special moment. Who knew a warm up could be that emotional…! Since then, we haven’t looked back, with almost all of the chorus tuning in on Jamulus each Wednesday singing together. We can go into section rooms and hold sectionals, play teach media alongside our singers, and have a chat after rehearsal. The only thing missing from a true rehearsal experience was the visual element.

...[a choir member] contacted us about a low latency open-source video software he’d come across called Jitsi Meet. He was able to set up a Jitsi server to run alongside our Jamulus server. It works similarly to Zoom in that it is a video conferencing app but, crucially, Jitsi has very low latency.

This means we can have Jamulus open for the sound and Jitsi open for the visuals, and they are both in sync with very little latency (~20-30ms), so we can see and hear each other in real time. This has opened up a whole new world for us as directors, being able to live direct a song and hear our singers react to our gestures.

As singers we can share our performances and work on visuals whilst all hearing how the performance has affected our sound. Simply put, it’s as close to a ‘normal’ rehearsal as possible. We’re all so excited about this! At the time of writing, we’ve had four full rehearsals with Jamulus and Jitsi, and of course there are teething problems, but each week it gets better and better."

The weekly London MYH soul funk jamulus jam is on again tonight
Genre Rock list, on MYHServer5-362.

Here's the Zoom link for the jam: https://bit.ly/36UTa8d
Meeting ID: 788 3447 0384
Passcode: maumau

Here’s the link to the stream - http://139.162.228.228:8000/MYH
along with the link for the chat function http://139.162.228.228:32123

1. Keep Forgetting - Rebecca Johnson Band
2. Pull Up to the Bumper - Grace Jones
3. Somebody like you - Frank McComb
4. Peg - Steely Dan
5. Groovin - Felix Cavaliere
6. Everybody Dance - Chic
7. You & I - Delegation
8. Brown Sugar - D'Angelo
9. Love Town - Booker Newberry III
10. Boogie On Reggae Woman - Stevie Wonder
11. Got Be Real (live, slow version) - Soul Street
12. Ain't No Stopping Us Now - McFadden/Whitehead
13. Papa Was A Rolling Stone - Temptations
14. South of the River - Tom Misch
15. How Deep is Your Love - PJ Morton & Yebba
16. I'm Diggin You - Like An Old Soul Record - Meshell Ndegeocello

Direct question: which one has the lowest latency and is the easiest to use for my Windows/Mac using friends?

Basslint wrote: ↑Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:07 pm Direct question: which one has the lowest latency and is the easiest to use for my Windows/Mac using friends?

Prerequisite is cabled connection and obviously as low internal audio latency as possible. I don't think any sync software adds any significant latency from their processing.

In terms of ease of use across platforms Jamulus and Sonobus are both straightforward, takes 5 minutes to install, setup, figure out basics. Linux users needs to build Sonobus first though or run it as a snap with jack1 (which most of us probably won't prefer).

Sonobus runs as a handy VST/AU plugin as well if you want to organize session recordings and backing tracks better (or keep a project file going between each meet or collab or teaching material etc.).

Next factor is somehow unpredictable and determined by ISP's route and gateways from your router to the remote music server or partner and back again for the full round-trip.

For Jamulus this depends mostly on physical location of the server. One of you may even be able to host the server with reasonable ping times for the clients. Or just try some open servers close by or cloud spin a new one from https://koord.live

For peer-to-peer connectors like Sonobus or JackTrip (and proprietary Soundjack, JamKazam etc.) you may need to open certain UDP ports locally. If that's sorted you can assume that distances up to 500km are still playable. Some report even much longer distances.