Ninjam is open source software to allow people to make real music together | Hacker News Reader

Ninjam is open source software to allow people to make real music together

cockos.com

108 pointsTomte13 comments

Ninjam is very cool and mature software with a nice community. However, not everyone can get used to the idea of playing one bar behind everybody else. While it can provide almost no-latency experience, some people just can't wrap their head around it. And, of course, it prevents rhythmic development and severely limits freedom of improvisation. For static beats and repetitive harmony it works great, though.

If you'd like to try jamming completely simultaneously, try Jamulus (federated client-server architecture) or Sonobus (p2p). Both are free software and work very well, at least as well as physics allow. In-city jams are hindrance-free, close cities and even close countries are usually painless, as long as everyone's on Ethernet, of course.

https://jamulus.io/

https://www.sonobus.net/

For longer distances endlesss is another option. It’s loop based which has its own set of pros/cons but it solves the latency free jamming problem quite well.

The best part about endlesss IMO is that the full 8 channel stems are revision controlled. Every new loop recorded makes a new “riff” revision. It allows rapid experimentation with different musical ideas both solo and with others.

https://endlesss.fm

Reaper is easily my favourite software project out there, been using it for years. Still not got around to trying Ninjam though.

Realearn is an essential extension if you like to use Reaper with control surfaces.

I highly recommend installing jamtaba (a ninjam client) which supports running as a vst plugin within DAWs like reaper.

This way you can sync the DAW and any outboard gear to the jamtaba/ninjam clock, and route your pre-existing setup into jamtaba/ninjam.

Personally I'm using Ableton, and it works great

Thanks, I'll check that out!

Woo we're talking Justin Frankel things again! In the last one of these threads I was fawning over Reaper and someone in the same thread mentioned LICEcap which changed my world a bit. So here's me doing it again. LICEcap is amazing, and you can export your captures and edit them in Reaper!

I use the delay (wet 100%) on my keyboard to force myself to play more accurately. Also it’s nice to try to “pre-hear” the note before you actually press the key. I go between 50-150ms. When i gradually decrease it to zero, often I feel my fingers like flying.

I haven’t tried playing with a bar delay yet. It’s a very interesting idea!

It works exceptionally well, you don't feel any delay locally since everyone is playing to the same clock but hearing the other jammers delayed by 1 bar.

Starting/stopping and big changes in songs can be interesting, but are doable.

Basically you choose the shortest bar length that works well for all players, usually between 8-16 beats.

This is how Jamulus works; it delays your own monitoring feed by your latency, so it is in sync with everyone else. If your ping to the server is 30ms then you'll hear yourself 30ms late (plus processing/audio buffer latency).

Worth mentioning Jamtaba (http://jamtaba.com) as well.

Jamtaba is a free (and open source) software to connect in ninjam servers

I find its UI is user friendly when getting started with jamming via ninjam, especially when inviting less technical friends to jam.

> I find its UI is user friendly when getting started with jamming via ninjam, especially when inviting less technical friends to jam.

I made another (somewhat functional!) NINJAM client[1] a few years back as a Chrome App with this motivation in mind. Eventually added a standalone Electron release to work around Chrome's deprecation of Chrome Apps, and sadly ended up abandoning it. I'd love to see a future for it as a PWA if the server software could be updated to handle WebSocket connections (rather than only TCP).

[1] https://github.com/BHSPitMonkey/ninjam-js

Real music as opposed to what? Fake music?

I think they mean “real audio”instead of something like midi-based music.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com