Show HN: Jazzroom, collaborative real-time music hack in Node.js | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Jazzroom, collaborative real-time music hack in Node.js

nowjs.com

45 pointssthatipamala23 comments

Three suggestions:

1. There needs to be a way to get a reference to a room (so I can give it to friends) since I'm yet to find a room where anybody else plays anything.

2. Would be nice to have some way to choose or switch instruments

3. Needs more notes... you can probably fit 3 octaves in if you use the numeric and qwerty row for one register and the asdfg and zxcvb rows for another.

I second all these points. At our company we have a "Play" session every day for 20 minutes. There's only 3 of us in this start-up (well, to be fair we're not really a startup, but thats a long story).

We all work in different locations, and up to now, we've been playing either hangman, or countdown, or 'Bananas' (anyone remember that game) online. Well we've been co-ordinating over skype and video.

Im thinking we could jazz things up a little and have a little jam session in our play time. Though, i wouldnt know how to best co-ordinate it. I cant play music to save my life.

Im thinking maybe get some notes for a song, and then get the guys together and try to create the score?

Suggestions welcome

Fun little thing to toy around with, for sure. :) The delay did drive me nuts, though, but I imagine that is quite a difficult hurdle to conquer with such latencies. Reminds me of doing music production work before I could afford an ASIO-capable sound card.

If there is anyone else out there thinking 'Yeah! It sucks writing music using my onboard soundcard!' check out Asio4All

http://www.asio4all.com/

Its a windows package that has asio drivers for most people's shitty onboard soundcards, giving you lower latency and higher sound quality. It also has the capability to compose multiple shitty soundcards and present them as one asio card with multiple ins and outs.

It's a great stopgap until you can afford a proper audio interface (or a proper operating system.)

The notes had too much of a delay for me to play anything decently. I like the idea though.

Notes play on key-UP, rather than down, so that might one cause of the delay.

This is somewhat unfortunate, as it means you can't sustain notes.

so I played the bass.. and though the notes are on piano keys, they're wrong (left to right should go up in pitch)

also, if this is jazz, use fingerstyle bass instead of a bow

(note: this is meant as constructive criticism to inspire improvement in the idea, not disparage it)

I knew I had the wrong type of bass! Thanks for the feedback.

'Slap bass' is another word for the type of thing you're looking for.

nope :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzicato

would be the appropriate style of playing.

For funk, certainly. For jazz, not so much.

Jazz is a pretty broad church. You can certainly slap a double bass. That was the only way anyone could hear it over the rest of the band before amplification was common.

I know you can slap a double bass, but this is not what people are talking about when calling the instrument "slap bass" usually. It's more Marcus Miller than Charlie Mingus, though both make music called "jazz".

To everyone having concerned about the delay, it's not a network issue. It's because notes play on key-UP, rather than down. (Because we're silly like that).

Let go of the key and the note will show up instantly. Sorry!

I've just played "rock around the clock" with some bass dude. So, if I understand, jazzrom is a HN 2011 startup that will create a way for musician to easily jam together?

If it's that, it's an idea I wanted to build some months ago. (I chose something else thought) Feel free to ping me if you want to talk about it / opinion from a musician/tech who would use your app.

When I started playing with node.js I forked their sample chatroom application to add a shared jukebox. Put on a song in the chatroom and everyone hears it.

https://github.com/akkartik/node_chat

The piano could really use more notes, and lag is a bit of an issue. But cool project!

Collaborative? No one else seems to be in the rooms I get assigned to...

For people who like this sort of thing, try ninjam: http://ninjam.com/ By the same dudes who wrote winamp.

switch to using keydown (that's how real instruments work) and add a metronome, and this might be usable!

I like the piano the best of the three.

Very erratic for me. Lovely idea though, very much looking forward to using!

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