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Comment by RossDM | Hacker News Reader

I thought this sort of thing was pretty much impossible due to latency issues.

One way to make a site like this work would be if instead of hitting notes / recording in real time, you would interact with a tracker. Just like playing around with an 808, people would be able to click to set drum hits or notes. It would get played next time the track loops around (after a few seconds), by which time hopefully everyone would be synchronized.

Or the realtime could just be an illusion, like in plink http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink/ (pretty fun little tool, even though you are quite limited because of the forced pentatonic scale and tempo)

Yeah, I don't see how it could be done.. unless all the players got optic fiber or something, and even so I'm not sure. I would be very interested in a collaborative sequencer though. Let's say drummer record a first loop, then everyone can hear it, guitarist plays a chord progression over it and record it, then the singer can add his part. The drummer then decides to add a special part at some place to go together with the singer and he edits his sequence so it's not 100% loop anymore, etc etc...

Fiber has great throughput, but doesn't guarantee lower latency. Distance, number of hops, and contention (for shared infrastructure transport) are more relevant when it comes to latency, and these are much, much more difficult to overcome than throughput challenges.

There are other solutions, however. Just have a look at any FPS (first person shooter) game. These types of games are extremely latency sensitive, because a win/loss in any direct engagement comes down to milliseconds. There are entire areas of study dedicated to working around latency in games. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the techniques could be applied to this type of real-time collaboration.

Yes, but music is even harder. I doubt most FPS shooters would suffer much at 60ms latency, but that's an 1/8 note at 120bpm. I would guess that for a jam session to feel OK, you'd want to be <15ms.

Musical tracking has to take special measures to keep the latency low enough even when its all local; see the need for ASIO, jackd, etc.

<pedantic> 120 bpm is 120 quarter note per minute, so a 8th note is 500ms, a 16th note is 250ms, a 32th 125ms. </pedantic> that said having played with a midi controller on badly configured linux machines i agree 15ms would start to be an issue.

Audio syncing over Skype can be done. We (http://SpeakerBlast.com) accomplished this with recorded media. We haven't attempted live audio yet, but think it can be done by caching/delaying the audio. It wouldn't be truly live, but the user wouldnt know. Over course if you lose Internet then the party is over either way.

30ms latency would kill the grove, I don't know how this could work.

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