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Comment by felipc | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago in Internet time, Justin Frankel (creator of Winamp) created a tool for live music collaboration that approached this problem in a very different way. Basically what it does is that it _adds_ delay for everyone in a way that synchronizes the musical measures, such that you play a measure while listening to everyone else's previous measure.

I never tried it because I'm not a musician (just a longtime fan of Justin and Winamp), but I always found the concept very interesting. Apparently it is still alive: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

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Bingo this is the answer. You can't "speed up" the speed of light, but you can have predetermined latency with a synchronized clock that lets you do lots of great things.

Other ideas (this is not new btw), you don't get to hear the other participants but you're all on the same sync'ed clock with a metronome and trust the general output will be ok. Final mix is synced to viewers (obviously on delay to achieve sync).

Most studio recordings are done iteratively, where you record a rough "scratch" track but then one by one, record over each part so that the final recording is the sum of everyone playing their best. This combines the feeling of playing with a group asynchronously with producing a high-quality recording. Would be cool to see tools to make this easier although the current gen of DAWs is pretty good.

It's worth watching some interviews with artist like Jack White to get their take on the quantization of music like this. It's not always the best way to make a track. And then when you get o concert If the artists can't bring it on stage then it's a bit of a letdown.

would love a link to such an interview if you have a particular one in mind

I wonder if this is why older music often sounds so much more pleasant and relaxed. Not recorded with a click track?

Latency is the most crucial issue for audio when doing live broadcasts, especially when the peers all need to be synchronized to a rhythm or pulse.

However, it doesn't stop there. Latency is also important for voice, not just music; excess latency is also the cause of the dreaded zoom fatigue [0].

We humans seem to have brains designed for particular cadences of conversation, and products like Zoom really work to disrupt & disengage these preferences we have, leading to poor communications outcomes.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-does-zoom-exhaust-you-scien...

I wonder if over time, we will learn to adapt to the new cadence as we continue to socialize over platforms like zoom. My hunch is that we will, it will just take time for our minds to adapt to the new medium.

I'm not so sure.

We'll likely fix the latency issues inherent to the way we do live broadcasting on the web today before the human race has the time needed to adapt to the new cadence.

Our vocal communication was solidified into our genetic code over millions of years of iteration. I imagine that in a decade or less, the latency issue will be fixed for most of the connected world.

I'm not sure i understand: if the cello is delayed so I can feel like I play my trumpet in sync, then the cello player can't also feel he'd in sync with the trumpet, he must be ahead.

So there is some sort of hierarchy of instruments or a dumb sync track pre-recorded.

I think it works only if everyone is playing the same chord/scale. Kinda like someone playing with a loop pedal. You're right that it definitely wouldn't work with a piece of music.

I'm not a musician, but I interpreted it like this:

Lets say the delay is 15 seconds, you hear the composite, including your part delayed, and you "think, cool, I played the right thing at the right time, I'll keep going with my same assumptions" or you hear "my part was way off, but the rest sounded decent enough, better do something different."

The part where everyone is just playing terribly isn't a concern or doesn't manifest because you've got a bunch of intermediate or better musicians playing.

if you've ever tried to talk against a mic with a delay of about a second, you'll know this is easier said than done.

This literally is marketed as a speech jammer.

You're right, but most speakerphones still aren't even properly full duplex, much less utopian zoom software for apex cyber virtual orchestras.

The amount of times I'm tripping up on my own words because the last thing I said is blaring out a friends/family mobile speakerphone and then back into the mic is disappointing on all levels, to say the least.

It probably works for practicing a few measures on repeat.

I've spent most of 2020 building something similar. Now I just wish I had a landing page ready so I can plug it here instead of over engineering the app itself, but oh well :)

Anyway, what I'm building is meant more for the repetitive kinds of electronic music, but I solved the problem by just making it work like a shared loop pedal that records up to 16 measures of audio.

Everyone works asynchronously and can add or remove audio on their own time, but loops get synced to other players as they get recorded.

Best part? You can do cool stuff with browsers nowadays (even record uncompressed audio). So it just needs a web browser.

No comment that mentions Justin Frankel and Winamp is complete without mentioning Reaper. Software written with true passion - that's what Winamp was and that's what Reaper is today.

We tackled this kind of problem with voice systems on the server side, record all streams simultaneously, sync and merge them and stream the recording. Downside, there will be a delay, but it is a fixed delay and its determined by the worst connection. ( this was around 1995 )

Ninjam is so much fun - and it just works!

Do you still use it?

What servers are you on? I remember hours, days of playing on it, 10 years ago :) But didnt know it was still active!

Hah, it's been a while, I haven't used it recently. I think we were using it on a self-hosted server just available to a couple of friends.

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