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Miscellaneous Anybody had success with video-conferenced ensemble eg sax quartet?

Chris J

Chris J

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There are a number of video-conferencing apps and websites. Has anybody had a good experience regarding lag, ease of use, general success?

Are the ones that cost more just as problematic regarding lag and fit for purpose, for four users with reasonable broadband, than cheaper options?

Chris
 
I have done it, and with audio only on JamKazam which is far less demanding.
Even for those in the same city, the lag would easily be at least 25 milliseconds. There's some in the hardware on each end and then the Internet lag. Signals will travel at almost the speed of light, but that's not fast enough. I don't think video would be possible outside the same building, except if there's no tempo. You can check this out and see;

JamKazam | Live, In-Sync Music Jamming Over the Internet

www.jamkazam.com www.jamkazam.com
 
Look at the YouTube comments, most say it won't work well because of the lag. There was a community and some of the guys had charts you could download. It can work if you play ambience type music with no beat, or, if you play music where it doesn't matter if you're in the right place :)

If the speed of light is 300,000 km/sec, 100 km would already be 33 ms one way. (I think?)
 
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I'm not great at math, obviously, but there will be 35ms minimum because there are multiple hops and as I said the latency of the Internet, servers, routers, etc. It doesn't seem like much, but the results aren't brilliant. I think, like old MIDI, it's bad for your time feel, too, because you try to compensate by playing early. Unless someone has developed a Douglas Adams uncertainty audio interface, you can't really beat physics.
 
One thing that would certainly work but requires more technical expertise is to have each member record their parts into a DAW and email files back and forth.
From a sax section of a jazz band perspective, I can see it working great: Lead alto records his part first, sends that out to all members, then they record their parts with it, and everything gets mixed. I can imagine it going similarly for any section work.
Where I am less certain of how well it would work is something like a sax quartet, where the leadership is passed around a lot.
You could use free DAWs like Cakewalk or Audacity. There is also the online DAW band lab, but in my experience with it, input monitoring is unusable.
 
I tried my 5 year-old JamKazam account, I'll possibky give it a test soon. There wasn't anything happening when I looked in.

I created an account on Jammr and downloaded that software. It's very basic. I entered a couple of "jams" but it was "Cacophony Blues in E". It's very hard to play along when there's no direction. JamKazam, when I used it back in the day, was more organized. I have a fibre connection now, where I didn't then. I measured my local latency at 11ms. Jamkazam will show the latency between you and the other person when you're connected, IIRC.
 
Ne0Wolf7 said:
One thing that would certainly work but requires more technical expertise is to have each member record their parts into a DAW and email files back and forth.
Click to expand...
Rhysonsax and I did exactly this to record a duet which was a transcription from a recording by Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern of "On the Sunny Side of the Street" with him on soprano sax and me on clarinet. We made a backing track as close to the original as possible and then each of us recorded our part listening to the backing track. Rhysonsax then did the final mix. It took some time, but it worked great.
 
I strongly suspect that live video-streaming jamming/playing will not work well with standard equipment as the inherent latency is too variable and too dynamic between the various parties (if you were all experiencing the same latency, then I suspect that could be adjusted for).
I think you'd need some specialist kit to make it work properly (probably things like fixed IP addresses, dedicated lines etc).
 
jbtsax said:
Rhysonsax and I did exactly this to record a duet which was a transcription from a recording by Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern of "On the Sunny Side of the Street" with him on soprano sax and me on clarinet. We made a backing track as close to the original as possible and then each of us recorded our part listening to the backing track. Rhysonsax then did the final mix. It took some time, but it worked great.
Click to expand...
I did it with @Chris too :)

Jx
 
Jeanette said:
cafesaxophone.com

July 2015 BOTM First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - Page 5 - Cafesax

First of all big thank you to Rob for hosting last month’s BOTM and for inviting me to host this one. :) As ever there were some great recordings. For this month I have chosen a song written by Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger background here and her version Searching YouTube there are quite a...
cafesaxophone.com cafesaxophone.com

Jx
Click to expand...

That was really lovely. I "liked" the recording on that thread and can't think why I didn't hear it when you first posted it.

I would like to hear more of your sop - nice tone, tuning and timing - in fact you have all the Ts sorted.

Rhys
 
@rhysonsax thank you for your kind words, much appreciated. I really should start recording again. I started having problems with audacity then tried a different software but struggled with it. Then work took over my life!!

Jx
 

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