Virtual Rehearsal Software

You want your sound to travel through a bunch of equipment, miles, in the same time it takes to travel 6ft in your rehearsal studio, ah no.
I think the JamKazam site says people 1200 miles apart have latency similar to being 25 feet from your amp.

I'm planning to do a test with my drummer in the next couple days. He's less than 40 miles away.
 
My band (6 people) started using JamKazam last week for our rehearsals. the software is quirky and has some bugs, but generally works once you have it setup (which can be a bit difficult due to the confusing ui and bugs). Our latency ranges from 30-70ms between each other which is manageable.
some recommendations:
  • if you are on a PC, make sure it is configured for live use and use a good asio audio interface to keep latency and dropouts under control. If you are already using the pc with a daw (and can run < 10 ms locally) you are starting off ok. We have a mix of PCs and Macs.
  • use a wired Ethernet connection, not WiFi. WiFi users will have higher latency. One of our members was getting 90-170 ms latency over WiFi that’s down to 20-40ms wired.
  • if you have any non tech savvy folks, setup a one-on-one jamkazam session with them first to get them setup. Don’t try to get the entire band together at once, or you’ll have people noodling on instruments (making it hard to help those that need it) or bored and giving up on the app.
  • don’t use the video, stick with voice & instruments. video seems really buggy (crashing clients) and will eat up a lot of bandwidth affecting the session quality.
  • make sure your audio interface is set to playback only, don’t mix in your input to your local session. The extra latency of jamkazam’s monitoring will cause some terrible comb filtering and make the audio sound poor.
  • you can load VSTs/AUs on your input channels. I haven’t tried this yet, but expect it will help any mic’d instruments (especially if you have a channel strip plugin that can give you some gating, compression and eq). Our guitars and bass run through Fractal gear which sounds great, but the drums really need help and the vocals are dry. My drummer is using 2x overhead mics and 1x kick mic for our jamkazam sessions.
everyone in my band is with 50 miles of each other.
 
Physical distance is no measure of the internet traversing that your packets will do.
This isn’t actually true. It takes time for signals to propagate. The greater the distance, the longer it takes. The absolute fastest a signal can travel to the other side of the planet is about 80ms. This assumes no switching, packet retransmissions, or any other intermediate factors that are always present.
The shorter the distance between two parties, the lower the latency will be, which is why being closer together makes jamming over the internet more likely to work.
 
In the simple case of just 2 people jamming does software like Jamkazam send your network traffic point to point between both people or does it send traffic to a central server? What network ports do these apps use? I assume that those running a NAT firewall need to open up ports and set up routing or DMZ.
 
Physical distance is no measure of the internet traversing that your packets will do.
That's what I would have thought as well. Until I was actually in a few sessions where people across the country "dropped in".
There's an easy way to actually see a latency reading in milliseconds for each person on the session. In fact, more experienced jammers seem to drop in on a session, get a quick reading of latency, and determine whether they want to stay or not, based on the reading. It's weird... but that's what people seem to do.
Anyway. The latency seems to have more to do with geographical proximity than any other single factor. If you use JamKazam, you'll immediately see what I mean.
 
WiFi users will have higher latency. One of our members was getting 90-170 ms latency over WiFi that’s down to 20-40ms wired.
Definitely seems true. But another factor that I was told about (and seems to be important) is the sample rate for your own audio gear, that you set in your initial configuration of that gear within JamKazam. 44.1k is the lowest option , and seems to require less processing– so presumably, faster– than the higher figure that is the default.
In order to make that change, I had to delete my audio gear setup, and start afresh. Seems to have helped.
 
This isn’t actually true. It takes time for signals to propagate. The greater the distance, the longer it takes. The absolute fastest a signal can travel to the other side of the planet is about 80ms. This assumes no switching, packet retransmissions, or any other intermediate factors that are always present.
The shorter the distance between two parties, the lower the latency will be, which is why being closer together makes jamming over the internet more likely to work.
So long as it is a peer to peer connection... what i meant was if the server is 1000 miles away, then it won’t matter if your buddy is next door.
 
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