Jamulus ‒ Play music online. With friends. For free

I maintain couple of digital music teaching rooms. (instruments connected via audio interfaces, teachers switch cameras via elgato minis, etc.) We also setup Jamulus with a couple of students, by sending out 100$ equipment packages. In Germany and it's mix of VDSL2 in the cities, ADSL on in the countryside and fiber for a couple lucky regions, Jamulus is a very mixed bag. If it works, it's magic, but the reality of infrastructure makes a recommendation hard, if you do not have an IT guy on staff.

Here is what we came up with: Whilst professionals can deal with the delay (playing notes in the future) that comes from Jamulus with a suboptimal connection, Students can not. We misuse Jamulus' concept to create a workaround. We walk students through port-forwarding and students start the jamulus server via a script, that connects to our private jamulus directory server. Then the teacher connects to the students machine. As a result, the student gets 0 delay and the teacher, with his experience has to carry deal with the delay and has to compensate for it. Huge pain to setup, but the quality of the lesson on the student's side does not suffer, even if the connection is bad.

On a funny side note, IRL I witnessed the exact opposite problem. A piano soloist professional was playing the Weichnachts Oratorium with the Kreuzchor choir I sang in. The soloist had to play the Harpsichord, which responds instantly (strings plucked under tension), as opposed to the Piano's hammmers, which have a "slight delay". The professional was so used to this "small delay", that he had to relearn and adjust a lot, because his professional experience with the piano produced too early timings with the conductor's actions. So the opposite of what teachers face with Jamulus.

Other FOSS product that tries to solve the same problem and which worked a little better for us. (We tried both)

https://www.sonobus.net/

Jamulus software is not only free (gratis and libre) but its use is completely anonymous: you may have to open a port but you don't have to open your inbox to spam or register in any way. And users don't need to authenticate to use a server, either "public" (i.e., advertised automatically in connection windows) or private (i.e., using an IP address known only to musical peers). There's no encryption but if you use a private server there's virtually no possibility of anyone other than designated peers to listen in.

I'm a so called semi-pro jazz bassist. During the pandemic, some friends invited me to join an online jam using Jamulus. So I learned some things.

I don't think that "latency" boils down to a single dimension, because there are multiple competing latencies when you play music. It's a complicated feedback loop with multiple input and output channels.

I think how well it works depends on being able to isolate the acoustic sound of your instrument from what's coming through your headphones. Your brain will prioritize whatever comes first, so if you can hear your own acoustic sound against the delayed sound of the band, you will instinctively slow down, and a band allowed to do this will grind to a halt. [0]

Electric instruments are easy, because they have little or no acoustic sound. I found it much easier to play solid body electric bass than double bass, though double bass is my main instrument. My hands adapted to the latency, as they do anyway because each instrument has inherent latency.

Winds and voice are difficult, because you hear yourself through bone conduction. Drums are hard to isolate with headphones. But people tend to (mistakenly) get the time from the drummer.

It fell to the electric instruments to "drive" the band. That was profoundly fatiguing. When I tried to take a solo, the band would get lost. And my solos can be blatantly rhythmic if I need them to be.

This is compounded by the fact that a lot of musicians are not techies, so the explanations about how they have to play differently, and work with the technology, goes over their heads.

[0] Imagine playing at 120 beats per minute, which is 500 ms per beat, with 30 ms latency. That's like 6% per beat. So while everybody says that 30 ms is pretty good, that much latency with the feedback loop described above will cause the band to lose tempo by 6% per beat. And 120 is a relatively stately tempo if you like "hot" jazz.

The magical belief that p2p is always superior to server-client for this kind of application has to be refuted. I live in Kingston Ontario, a medium-sized city between Montreal and Toronto. There are essentially two high-speed ISPs: Bell, using fiber, and Cogeco, using cable. Latency between peers on the same network is usable, but packets from one network to the other, even a few blocks apart, are routed via, for example, Toronto to Chicago to New York to Montreal and finally back to Kingston. It's not the distance travelled that was problematical; it's the latency introduced at each intermediate node. By setting up a server at AWS in Montreal, the latency for peers on both networks became usable.

Also, p2p requires O(n^2) links whereas client-server has O(n) links, so if the number of peers increases, the total travel time difference will be more significant.

While there is definitely some latency, we’ve found it to be bearable. Last week we just performed a jam session of 10 people live on the PyCon APAC online conference using Jamulus, and here’s the video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvb_n1fwH4E and one more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inGQdo1nrt0

Most new people who try out Jamulus and join our servers would complain about the latency (especially professional musicians), to which I give the same advice: 1) Use a fiber-optic internet service. 2) Use a LAN cable. 3) Use wired headphone (no bluetooth/wireless headphone/AirPods). 4) Use an audio interface with ASIO device or use a Mac. Finally, and most important: 5) Just play 100 songs on Jamulus, and you’ll eventually get used to it.

Most friends are jamming with latency of around 20ms. I have found that for vocals and drums, maximum latency tolerance is around 30ms. For me I play the keyboard and most of the time I’m jamming over a 4G mobile network, I have increased my latency tolerance to about 100ms now.

I know people who regularly used this for rehearsals during the pandemic (maybe they still do). I told them about it when it was previously featured here. They were thrilled. These were people that used to meet locally, so presumably the latency was relatively good.

Another group was interested, but the setup was too complicated for them (wired ethernet, messing around with asio). But if you can get beyond that, it's apparently pretty great. There might be a product idea there, a plug and play solution that avoids the manual setup.

Tried it UK AU. Some latency cannot be fixed. It's 200ms class delay. Light speed gotta rise.

There is also an old project by one of the Winamp creators https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

I read somewhere that musicians can only tolerate up to ~20ms latency to be able to perform together “live”.

The speed of light gives you ~186 miles per millisecond, which assuming you need to make a round trip in 20ms gives you an upper distance of ~1900 miles for live performance.

In reality however this will be much lower due to processing overhead, speed of light in fiber (~0.7e), and internet backbone topology.

Curious to know if the creators have done any tests, (or can show any demos) of the effective range this works at?

By following the setup guide I was able to achieve 30-60ms latency. It's still a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time playing with others during the pandemic. A few tips for better experience: - Mute participants that have high delay. - Avoid rooms with more than ~10 participants. - Mute yourself if you are not playing. - Adjust your volume properly. If you are too loud, others may hear clicks and may perceive it as audio drops.

So far in the comments only worries about latency.

I had the same worries when my father told me about Jamulous and that his band started using it during the pandemic. They are a cajun band and mostly jam and they were singing the softwares praises and have used it for all practice leading up to the real life perfomances they've had the last few weekends.

It seems it's not actually a big issue, at least over a distance of about 300 miles.

Light is not fast enough to do this for real... Do they have a new UI trick that is good enough to be fun?

Our business is virtual live music. We have tried everything - Jamulus, JamKazam, various plugins for Ableton, Protools, Logic, etc. Bottom line is speed of light = speed of light.

Good musicians can adapt to low-latency group playback, but it's difficult, and at that point, it isn't true realtime collaboration. The band/musicians are more focused on staying in time and fighting the latency versus really listening to each other and being a band.

One great tool for doing long-distance collaboration is Endlesss. (yes, three "s"s). Loop-based work that allows for real collaboration, and getting around the latency issue.

Endlesss.fm is the way to go for playing music with friends online for free.

Instead of trying to beat network latency (which is impossible) endlesss provides a shared looper and a clock to sync all your gear to. This way you can jam with people with zero audible latency, building up ideas. And a bonus is that every version (“riff”) is stored and can be revisited or exported into a DAW. It’s an incredible tool.

For those who didn't take the bit of time to read the case study linked on the homepage of the OP, it answers the obvious question of "well isn't latency a problem?". It's well written and lays out some neat ideas.

For those who are too lazy -- TL;DR:

The software allows players to set up servers easily so if a band is geographically close, but remotely dialing in, latency is reduced. The software is intended to be used as the primary method of sound feedback so it's advised that amps are turned off and earplugs/headphones are used to block out "local" sound. And finally, the author of the case study found that their experience with latency was between 30-70ms and that was more than acceptable. The only problem stemming from this latency was that songs with fast drum fills needed some adjustments to slow down the drum fills.

So now that the tech exists, where is the service that helps matching different people who want to jam?

There's no way latency over the internet would be low enough to jam together... The latency of normal local computer soundcards without ASIO is too high for jamming. Anything above 10ms is noticeable.

i was thinking that maybe a different approach with regard to latency could be tried... after all, these are not trades that need to reach a central server.

Rather than reduce latency, why not increase latency so that for the participant with the worst bandwidth, it can be delayed 1 sec, for the one with the best, it is delayed so that it syncs with the other person.

For a period of time when all participants have clicked that they are ready, real time is suspended, and some kind of calculation is made that will the voices in sync.