Cockos Incorporated Forums - View Single Post - Any Ninjam users who also use eJamming? Musigy?

corrados · 12-24-2009, 03:45 AM

Just some additional thoughts on real-time jamming.

I have monitored this topic since some years now and it seems that companies come and go. E.g. http://www.Jamnow.com has disappeared and on the http://www.Musigy.com homepage I can only find some old links but no software anymore. It seems there is no real market for that at present.

I have tried out onlinejamsessions.com and eJamming by myself. Onlinejamsessions is a joke since you have a strong delay and you do not actually play together. Using Skype would probably give the same results. eJamming did also not satisfy me since you need a lot of bandwidth (client to client connections) and the expected latencies are way beyond my expectations of a "real-time jam". Also, the concept of creating "seats" in a session which are reserved for other musicians is worse than the concept of the open Ninjam servers where everybody can join until the maximum number of allowed Ninjam clients is reached.

I had a lot of great jams on Ninjam in the past and really like the sound quality and that you do not have latency issues if you are used to the "measures". For improvisational music my personal opinion is that there is no better solution available.

Since I also want to play covers, too, my personal attempt for real-time online jamming is an Open Source software I have written which is available at http://llcon.sf.net. On the Ninjam homepage you can read: "[...]perceptual CODEC latency (>20ms), plus typical and theoretical network latency (>40ms)[...]". This is not true anymore since the internet becomes faster and faster (typically 30 ms per 1000 km distance) and since the new http://www.celt-codec.org codec was written, even the audio codec latency has shrink to typically 3 to 9 ms.

If the distance to the server is less than 1000 km, with a good hardware setup you get about 40-45 ms of overall delay with the llcon software. My personal delay tolerance is: <20 ms is perfect, <40 ms is quite good even for playing drums and >60 ms is not tolerable. This concludes that distances >1000 km from the server do not work which makes word-wide real-time jams impossible.

My conclusion: Commercial solutions for real-time jamming do not provide good solutions right now. Ninjam is great for quickly finding great musicians to play improvisiational music with since there is already a large community and it works world-wide. llcon is a free alternative for true real-time jamming but with the limitation that you require a good hardware setup and you have to be located close to the server.

12-24-2009, 03:45 AM	#10
corrados Human being with feelings Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 2	Just some additional thoughts on real-time jamming. I have monitored this topic since some years now and it seems that companies come and go. E.g. http://www.Jamnow.com has disappeared and on the http://www.Musigy.com homepage I can only find some old links but no software anymore. It seems there is no real market for that at present. I have tried out onlinejamsessions.com and eJamming by myself. Onlinejamsessions is a joke since you have a strong delay and you do not actually play together. Using Skype would probably give the same results. eJamming did also not satisfy me since you need a lot of bandwidth (client to client connections) and the expected latencies are way beyond my expectations of a "real-time jam". Also, the concept of creating "seats" in a session which are reserved for other musicians is worse than the concept of the open Ninjam servers where everybody can join until the maximum number of allowed Ninjam clients is reached. I had a lot of great jams on Ninjam in the past and really like the sound quality and that you do not have latency issues if you are used to the "measures". For improvisational music my personal opinion is that there is no better solution available. Since I also want to play covers, too, my personal attempt for real-time online jamming is an Open Source software I have written which is available at http://llcon.sf.net. On the Ninjam homepage you can read: "[...]perceptual CODEC latency (>20ms), plus typical and theoretical network latency (>40ms)[...]". This is not true anymore since the internet becomes faster and faster (typically 30 ms per 1000 km distance) and since the new http://www.celt-codec.org codec was written, even the audio codec latency has shrink to typically 3 to 9 ms. If the distance to the server is less than 1000 km, with a good hardware setup you get about 40-45 ms of overall delay with the llcon software. My personal delay tolerance is: <20 ms is perfect, <40 ms is quite good even for playing drums and >60 ms is not tolerable. This concludes that distances >1000 km from the server do not work which makes word-wide real-time jams impossible. My conclusion: Commercial solutions for real-time jamming do not provide good solutions right now. Ninjam is great for quickly finding great musicians to play improvisiational music with since there is already a large community and it works world-wide. llcon is a free alternative for true real-time jamming but with the limitation that you require a good hardware setup and you have to be located close to the server.