A short note summarizing my experience trying Jamulus for a group of socially distancing a capella singers (barbershop, specifically) in Washington state, US.
I put up a server on my fios internet, with ping times on the order of 5 milliseconds to nearby servers (speedtest.net) and down/upload speeds > 100mbits. A handful of us ran the clients on whatever laptops (pc and mac) they had handy. I think all of the pcs needed ASIO4ALL, so there was a chunk of latency right there, maybe 30 ms? Some of us had wired connections, but most were over wifi with decent internet.
Unfortunately, most were reporting overall delays over 50 milliseconds, some as much as 100 milliseconds.
As a capella singers, we try to listen to each carefully and the delay was too much. Even when we made an effort to "lead" what we were hearing from each other, every song we tried slowed way down.
I understand that getting a wired connection for everyone, and better audio interfaces, might get the delay down to a usable level, but as a bunch of not very techie singers, on average, that's not so easy.
That said, I've been very impressed with the software, and clearly with the right equipment, and at least an instrument or two to drive the tempo, it's a terrific resource.
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I understand that getting a wired connection for everyone, and better audio interfaces, might get the delay down to a usable level, but as a bunch of not very techie singers, on average, that's not so easy.
You're right - this is the fundamental challenge with Jamulus. I'm hoping we can work on the docs a bit more so that we can set people's expectations a bit better and help them understand the issues. Latency can be brought down to decent levels.
Last edit: Gilgongo 2020-03-26
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
A short note summarizing my experience trying Jamulus for a group of socially distancing a capella singers (barbershop, specifically) in Washington state, US.
I put up a server on my fios internet, with ping times on the order of 5 milliseconds to nearby servers (speedtest.net) and down/upload speeds > 100mbits. A handful of us ran the clients on whatever laptops (pc and mac) they had handy. I think all of the pcs needed ASIO4ALL, so there was a chunk of latency right there, maybe 30 ms? Some of us had wired connections, but most were over wifi with decent internet.
Unfortunately, most were reporting overall delays over 50 milliseconds, some as much as 100 milliseconds.
As a capella singers, we try to listen to each carefully and the delay was too much. Even when we made an effort to "lead" what we were hearing from each other, every song we tried slowed way down.
I understand that getting a wired connection for everyone, and better audio interfaces, might get the delay down to a usable level, but as a bunch of not very techie singers, on average, that's not so easy.
That said, I've been very impressed with the software, and clearly with the right equipment, and at least an instrument or two to drive the tempo, it's a terrific resource.
You're right - this is the fundamental challenge with Jamulus. I'm hoping we can work on the docs a bit more so that we can set people's expectations a bit better and help them understand the issues. Latency can be brought down to decent levels.
Last edit: Gilgongo 2020-03-26
https://sourceforge.net/p/llcon/discussion/533517/thread/39cb75125c/