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Hi everyone, I'm not sure if I'm posting this is the right forum since it's a question on online jamming but I was wondering if anyone has (recently) used JamKazam? I did a search before posting this and it looks like the last comments were a little over a year ago so just wondering if they've made any improvements on the latency issues (or any other improvements for that matter). Thanks!
Sorry I didn't catch this post earlier...Quote:
Originally Posted by ChrisWallace1
I'm still hosting and administering a Wernick-style JamKazam bluegrass jam at 4pm Pacific Time daily. This jam has been active since the onset of the pandemic.
We average between 4 and 8 people from all over North America in this online jam, although it varies as it always has; I haven't seen any notable consistent changes in that regard. I send daily automated invitations to about 42 people. I am aware of at least a few other people who also host jams of bluegrass and other genre, multiple times a week.
I haven't seen any user-visible updates to JamKazam since about a year after they started charging. That's ok though, the service is pretty consistent and most of us who are around all the time are acquainted with the important bugs enough to work around them. When they were upgrading often, it was hard to know what to expect. For those of us who pay in the top 2 tiers, JamKazam still has pretty decent helpdesk support.
We very consistently use StrumMachine as a backing track to help keep time and it dramatically helps hide latency. Actually with StrumMachine, most of the time we don't notice much if any latency.
Most of us who attend these sessions still say they are a great way to jam and have really been a godsend since the pandemic. While most of the active jams on JamKazam only use audio, the jamming communities have formed and they are pretty tight. Technically JamKazam can be pretty challenging, but being able to jam daily with people across the continent and to get to know them as musical friends is pretty amazing.
Another regular user of JamKazam and Mandolin Cafe is MickyG. I used JamKazam for a while playing and talking before they started charging fees. The experience, compared to Zoom was similar except that JamKazam was quite technical in terms of connecting. It was far better for playing music and if I had regular friends on that platform, it would certainly be worth the money and technical challenges.
I am the person that DougC referred to above. I've been using JamKazam (JK) for over 8 years. While the requirements are steep (microphone, audio interface, headphones & a wired Internet connection), I find it is worth the expense and effort. I connect every day with friends in Austin,Texas, the Twin Cities and (sometimes) Seattle. We play from a list of over 100 traditional Irish tunes - reels, jigs, slides, polkas and hornpipes. With fiber optic Internet, the experience is best but standard cable is acceptable (WiFi is not). Our experiences vary from day-to-day - some days are great, some are Ok, but rarely unworkable. It can be frustrating but if you're patient, JK is a great way to keep in contact with distant musical friends. Unlike most other on-line jamming apps, JK allows video (as well as audio, of course).Quote:
Originally Posted by DougC
PM me if you want help connecting to JK.
MikeyG
Possibly worth mentioning, JK is pretty tolerant of microphone and audio interface hardware variations...Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeyG
I purchased a new relatively high-end HP laptop in early 2020, which included an embedded stereo sound system featuring 2 mics. I've been using that with JK since then, with no additonal external audio interface, even using the standard Windows WDM driver (not an ASIO driver). Latency is low and surprisingly I get high marks for the driver from JK's config report ("Excellent Audio Driver: Windows WDM-KS").
So depending on the system involved, an external audio interface and special mics may not be required for JK.
However, being able to successfully wade through the assortment of configuration processes is required. With the complexity, though, there are a lot of things that users have control over, many which, at least on a good Internet traffic day, make the service work really quite well.