Help with video chat jam session

[Ken]

I need some help from some of you techies out there. One of our trio is out in Seattle for an extended stay. Last night we tried to have our weekly session using Google video chat, we have also tried Apple face-time and Skype. The problem with all three is the lag time between sites making it impossible to play in sync. The best we were able to do was to turn the volume down at one end or the other and then play along as if we were playing along with You Tube. Its better than nothing, but kind of limits harmony singing and sharing breaks. Anyone aware of a better method? For what it's worth the computers at both ends are Macs. Not sure what the internet provider is at either end but it is ATT or Comcast at this end.
Thanks, Ken

[stonefingers]

What you seek is the holy grail of remote band rehearsal. It is actually very difficult to do well, and unfortunately not because of the music, but because of limitations in technology and physics in general.
There is however one company that does a pretty decent job of it and has built a service around their tech.

http://www.ejamming.com/

They're not perfect, but they are the leader of the pack for connecting multiple people in varied locations and keeping the audio in sync.

[Folkmusician.com]

Hi Ken,

With the latency, it will be pretty much impossible to have a 100% live jam with multiple players in sync. You can however, work on songs together in close to realtime. This would require some kind of streaming service. I hadn't heard of EJamming, but it looks like it is worth a shot.

[Bill Burch]

Hi Ken,

I know a bit about this from first-hand experience. I work as a producer at Cisco Systems and have done concert events using our TelePresence collaborative video conferencing system. We are talking large bandwidth, 2 way HD video systems. As mentioned, you will always have network latency issues as well as DSP (digital signal processing) delays introduced by the systems, either its Apple's Facetime or a $250K corporate system. These delays are manageable for voice conversations, but as soon as you try and get all the sites to play together, it falls apart. I start out with a counting or click, you hear me some milliseconds later and play along, then I hear your audio come back to me delayed even further. Factor in that I may be hearing my initial audio come back to me over the open microphones you had in your room and things fall apart quickly.

If this issue had been successfully resolved, you would have seen collaborative live performances on shows like the Grammy's. But as other posters have mentioned, the laws of physics and network latency realities have kept it from being a satisfactory possibility.

Bill

[Steve Lavelle]

My day job is at a manufacturer of some of the highest bandwidth fiber optic telecom systems equipment available. Here's the math: distance in km from Chicago to Seattle is optimistically about 3500 km. Speed of light in fiber is ~1.5 x that of vacuum, which works out to about 4.9 µs delay per km. 3500 X 4.9 = 17150 µs delay (17.15 ms) in one direction (longer if the signal goes through switching at each end). 17ms is a what a chorus effect sounds like. There is also a delay between what you hear and how fast you respond to it. that gets added to that. All that is just in one direction, interactive playing requires dealing with the delay in both directions.

Don't know how you can beat the laws of physics on this.

[Elliot Luber]

Telephone may be your best bet. You can each record your half and edit it together later.

[Ken]

Thanks to all for your responses. Looks like I need to check out EJamming, but if that doesn't work for us, we'll just keep playing back and forth and stumble through it.
Ken

[Cheryl Watson]

Yes, Skype and Facetime were designed for back and forth conversation, not music. Jamming has proven itself impossible. For lessons, I have my student use a dedicated line into their router, while I use wifi (I cannot set up near my router) and there is very little lag and clear video for us to take turns playing. But see, as one person is playing, the audio is cut off to hear the other person, so you have to take turns playing and speaking. I only have one long distance Skype student left as most people far prefer lessons in person and they quit our of frustration. A good part of teaching music is playing together and that is where Skype and similar programs fail. The technology is just not there to jam in real time. I certainly wish it was. I've not tried Ejamming, as yet. And thanks to the guys who explained the physics of this.

[Loudloar]

Telephone may be your best bet.

There's no such thing as a Telephone system any more, in the old analog sense. All calls are turned into digital packets and sent across a digital network with all the inherent delay that is being discussed. For that matter, I imagine the old analog telephone system had delay too, just that no one was trying to do a two-way jam session in those days.

Steve

[jesserules]

I awakened the Ancient Wise Man of our people from his decades-long sleep, and he has confirmed that there would be a delay during long distance conversations on the "telephone".

[Loudloar]

Heck, there's even a delay across the room. (We call it reverb.) With a distance of more than a few feet it can be very difficult for musicians to play together. I think that's why an orchestra has everyone crammed together as tightly as possible.

A few years ago my church was putting on a big Christmas program. They planned one instrumental number with a very creative idea. They positioned a set of musicians in the balcony to play pipes made of different lengths of 4" plastic pipe. They "played" the pipes by whacking the end with a flip flop, producing low notes. It was a great idea. BUT the balcony was sixty feet from the stage where the rest of the orchestra was located. The time delay made it impossible for the balcony "Pipe" players to keep in time with the orchestra. After one failed rehearsal they moved the pipes to the stage, next to the rest of the musicians. So even in an acoustic space, time delay can be a serious issue.

Steve