Topic: Jam session over internet for geographically separated band members?

[Gutbucket]

Can anyone point me to practical, inexpensive methods for collaborative music playing by non-local musicians over an internet connection?

I imagine sufficiently low latency to be the fundamental problem, along with sufficient audio quality, both of which I presume probably eliminate typical remote meeting services such as Zoom. Musicians in this group are located on both the East and West coasts of the USA. Figured I'd ask here before jumping into the rabbit hole with limited knowledge, and curious to hear about the experience of other TS members with this.

[goodcooker]

Jamkazam has a free version that allows for 4 users at a time, 1 hour sessions up to 4 hours per month. If ALL users have super reliable internet then all you need is for each user to have an audio interface. We tried it and it didn't work due to spotty internet - not everyone has fiber or reliable/uncongested cable internet - so we didn't need to investigate the subscriptions.

Lutefish Stream is developed for this but it costs. You need their $250 hardware interface - which connects directly to your router bypassing your wifi and computer to avoid latency - and one of their subscriptions. There's a video out there of Stevie Wonder demoing it at AES (if memory serves).

Are you rehearsing/writing or recording? If you are recording collaboratively there's Bandlab.

[Gutbucket]

Thanks that helps a lot with a few good starting points. Interest is rehearsing/writing/jamming, which may lead to non-realtime collaborative recording.  Spurred by a 40 year reunion of old highschool era band a couple weeks back which was good fun.  I'm exploring options to share with the group at this point.

[DanialJohns]

Low-latency collaboration is the main challenge for real-time playing over the internet. Most general meeting apps add too much delay, so they don’t work well for tight musical timing. Some musicians have had better results with tools built specifically for live jamming, but even those depend on strong connections and short distances between players. East and West Coast will always add some delay, so the goal is to keep it low enough to stay playable. These setups can work if everyone uses wired connections, decent interfaces, and software made for this kind of session.

[vantheman]

There’s an app called FarPlay by a great pianist named Dan Tepfer. It uses some known libraries under the hood but it’s been a while since I’ve looked at it: https://farplay.io/

I was going to try to get my flamenco teacher in Spain to use it, but he’s so non technical that I’m lucky I was able to teach him how to use WhatsApp for online classes.

Dan Tepfer: https://youtu.be/SaadsrHBygc?si=4wJ5YKLEyxtqDncJ