Members rasputin1963 Posted May 29, 2007 Members Share Posted May 29, 2007 I remember in the early 90's they were talking about the fast-approaching day when musicians could hook up their MIDI toys online, from a variety of distant points on the globe, and jam together live in realtime. Has this happened? Where is it happening? Who's doing it? How does one do it? Is bandwith speed/latency up to scratch for doing this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Wide Posted May 29, 2007 Members Share Posted May 29, 2007 In a recent FORTUNE magazine, they briefly described a company called eJamming (located in Valley Village, CA and Orlando, FL). Their software is still in beta, and eventually it will be available on a subscription basis. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted May 29, 2007 Members Share Posted May 29, 2007 Yeah there are a couple of companies offering this, neither of whom have really gotten around the latency issue enough to make it worthwhile for a good performance, IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 Yeah there are a couple of companies offering this, neither of whom have really gotten around the latency issue enough to make it worthwhile for a good performance, IMO. Nor will they ever until they seriously re-engineer the internet and possibly repeal the laws of physics. One of the "realtime jamming" services I looked over offerered jams with people in "realtime" but warned about latencies and suggested that, for now, jamming was limited to people in the same town. But as long as packets travel the internet as they do, I'm afraid we're going to see basic speed-of-electrical-signal-transmission multiplied by internet packet buffering prevent anything much like what folks would like. (Signal packet transmission from coast to coast seems to run around 90-100 ms most days. Add local software and hardware latency to that.) That said, the folks from Reaper have come up with a sort of not-quite realtime jamming that's... interesting. But you can't hear the other people as they play -- you're behind what they've played. And they hear YOU after you've played, as well. Imagine laying down a drum beat into cyberspace. Then one guy -- we'll call him A --starts playing guitar. The signal with A playing guitar over the drums arrives at B's computer and he starts laying down some bass against what he hears. The signal from B's bass is sent to A's computer which is set to play it x number of bars "behind" A's starting point. It's sort of loop oriented -- but nothing exactly loops, if that makes any sense. It can mutate -- to be sure -- but since no one can hear each other in realtime, it's... uh... interesting. I tried to do something but I found it completely unintuitive... and I did a live echo loop act for years... Still it's... interesting.* A good excuse to DL and install Reaper, if nothing else. _____________ * What it could be interesting for would be not-quite realtime collaboration or song workshops, song swapping, and the like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 Yeah, what you're talking about is called stream relaying. Some musicians in Second Life have been using that to do virtual gigs. It's pretty cool, but it seems to work best when there's clearly one guy "driving the bus" - like a singer/acoustic player who kicks things off, and other people add harmonies, percusion, keys or whatever down the line. Of course the original performer doesn't hear what anyone else is adding, so it's a little strange... but yeah, it works. My band is really enjoying doing the Second Life shows, but we're all physically in the same room when we play! Even though our audiences are scattered around the globe. They are hearing us with quite a bit of latency, but then it doesn't matter because they're hearing the complete mix. It IS a little disconcerting for us interacting with the audience, though - you finish a song and it's deadly silent... then 20 seconds later, after you've started the next song... WILD APPLAUSE!!! LOL... or we'll say something to the audience and somebody will reply an eternity later or vice versa. It's still pretty freakin cool, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 Yeah, I saw that people were using the Reaper plug to do some kind of concerts/jams in Second Life... that sounds really... interesting... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members pipelineaudio Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 ReaNinJAM or standalone NINJAM can work fine as long as you realize the parameters of when things will happen...lately weve been logging sonme pretty good stuff! ejammer is so incredibly latent I dont see how anyone could use it...in NINJAM theres a bit of cheating going on but its good cheating Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members elsongs Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 This is cool, but just wondering if the virtual club owner will get on your case for not drawing enough clicks to the site Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members franknputer Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 Actually, I've seen people jamming in Second Life without Reaper. They just directed their stream to the next person manually. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 Yeah, I've seen that too. Pretty interesting stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted May 30, 2007 Members Share Posted May 30, 2007 This is cool, but just wondering if the virtual club owner will get on your case for not drawing enough clicks to the site Or get closed for selling virtual drinks to virtual teenagers... I have to admit that the presumed charms of Second Life have so far escaped me... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted June 1, 2007 Members Share Posted June 1, 2007 I have to admit that the presumed charms of Second Life have so far escaped me... Well it's pretty much like the web, or like a lot of things... it is for the most part what you make of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted June 1, 2007 Members Share Posted June 1, 2007 Well it's pretty much like the web, or like a lot of things... it is for the most part what you make of it. As is so much in life... but even more so, one presumes, on the virtual side of the mirror. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members the stranger Posted June 1, 2007 Members Share Posted June 1, 2007 Well it's pretty much like the web, or like a lot of things... it is for the most part what you make of it. I think I'll pass. Knobs story was enough to make me run like hell! Although that's just his experience, but I prefer to live vicariously through Knobs. It's safer, ya know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted June 1, 2007 Members Share Posted June 1, 2007 LOL... well let's just say Knobs hangs out in very different areas of the virtual world than I do. Second Life really is like the WWW in 3D. There are a lot of web sites you wouldn't want to go to, right? And if somebody told some sordid story about going to one of these sites and getting hooked up with some shady or psychotic people, you wouldn't conclude that therefore the entire Web is not worth dealing with, would you? Well it's the same thing. You can search for things in SL just like using Google, you can visit only the places you want to visit, and everything is created by the users so the content and focus of each virtual place is about as diverse as what's on the web. In any case, I don't think anybody will be able to ignore it for too much longer. I think over the next couple of years it's going to become as ubiquitous as the web, and I'm already honing my development skillz in SL as I don't think it'll be long before I'm asked to do some professional work in it by a client. I know a couple of people who are already doing that. Meanwhile, the band is enjoying performing, and we've made some quite valuable contacts there already. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ew_ Posted June 1, 2007 Members Share Posted June 1, 2007 I know a couple people who do live electronica netcasts that way using Reaktor and OSC... ew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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