Online "jamming" sites - anyone know anything about 'em ?

[davd_indigo]

Over on pianoworld a guy posted saying he's a Swedish sax player who'd like to jam online. He mentioned a site named "jammr" . I went there and the "How It Works" "Help" ect. links at the top don't work. It mentions Friday and Saturday jam sessions at 190 utc (time zone?). --edit: that emoticon seems to appear when the letters "u" "t" and "c" are combined.

 

I'm not going to download their software, but wondered If anyone knows the lowdown. Their site says something about no latency. Maybe this is a new scam. Who knows.

[philboking]

I've heard of Jammr too, but haven't tried it. It's relevant to me because I'm hooking up with a band about 200 miles away, so commutes for rehearsals aren't practical.

 

While looking into this, I found there is a Reaper plugin that allows 'sort of' realtime 2 way audio communication. To handle latency, there is a 4 bar time lag. I don't know how this could possibly work well; again I haven't tried it yet. Now that I finally have a decent internet connection I plan to look into it further. Link:

http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

 

Here's another realtime collab tool for Reaper called ReaNet:

https://www.ohmstudio.com/homepage

 

Another (non-realtime) collaboration Reaper plugin uses DropBox as a file repository, where you can check out, edit/add to a project, and replace it. The repository is locked while any single user has a file checked out. Here's a link:

https://github.com/ironcladlou/realay

[blue2blue]

Yeah, the Reaper Ninjam 'loop jamming' thing is about the only way realtime jamming can work over the Internet because of the substantial latencies involved. The jam leader will play a phrase and everyone else will hear it x bars later, play their part, and then the leader will hear those parts a similar delay later. No one can hear what others are playing simultaneously. It's nothing like conventional jamming.

 

http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

 

 

Now there are a couple of online services (one was heavily promoted on Facebook -- or seemed that way with my musician-heavy mix of friends) that promised 'real-time jamming' -- but with the latencies involved in typical Internet network traffic, the latencies blow way out beyond anything really usable by real musicians. It's basic physics. Yet you still see the adverts and ludicrous claims -- but, at least on FB, you also see a chorus of replies from wised-up musicians pointing out it can't work, at least as claimed. (On those rare occasions I've seen a company response, the answers were extremely vague -- and, amusingly, they said their technicians were working on the issue. What are they gonna do -- speed up the speed of electric current flow over copper? Give me a break.)

[Anderton]

At one point, there were a number of sites intended for musical collaboration...they all faded away. I was going to do a roundup review for Electronic Musicians, and 8 companies were all too happy to give me a free temporary account, as well as for friends, to check them out. This seemed ideal because I was doing a lot of work with Dr. Walker over in Germany at the time.

 

When I asked him if he wanted to sign up and test doing some collaborations, he said "If I can't drink a beer and look you in the eye, we're not collaborating." End of story. I guess his attitude was pretty much universal

 

There was a company that proposed doing internet jams with MIDI and claimed they could get latencies of around 50 ms...almost good enough, but not really. I don't think it ever developed into something. I think the best we can hope for isn't jamming as we know it, but overdubbing to something either streamed or sent to you on the internet.