16 ms·
"The biggest problem is Latency". Try turning off video and instead run Mumble with low latency settings. Should be way better than zoom at least. Why do we alw
by Moru 6y ago
"The biggest problem is Latency". Try turning off video and instead run Mumble with low latency settings. Should be way better than zoom at least. Why do we always have to create something new from scratch when we already have a solution that just needs a bit of polish?
- jackson1442 6y agoMumble requires running your own servers, and many universities already pay for Zoom licenses. Why not ask your vendor to add a feature to software you're already paying for?
- upofadown 6y agoFew people run their own Mumble server. Instead they rent one for anywhere from free to a few bucks a month.
- gabereiser 6y agoLatency will always be an issue here. 200ms is enough to throw off the timing of an “all-at-once” note or syncing up sections. I’ve been a hobbyist musician since leaving school 20 years ago. I play piano, guitar, bass, mandolin, cello, drums, etc. All of the typical video platforms fall short of having a low enough latency to achieve “remote orchestra”. There was one product/service that I tried that got closer than anyone, JamKazam (https://jamkazam.com/ https://jamkazam.com/) and there were a few audio only options back mid-2000s that had close to 20-50ms which was better.
- kayodelycaon 6y agoUsing Wi-Fi in my office adds up to 150ms of latency. (20m cat5 Ethernet cable has < 1ms)
- Jonnax 6y agoIs that with bad signal? Sounds like something is wrong with your setup. Got a Unifi AC LR and it only adds about 4 to t 6ms over Ethernet.
- ikiris 6y agoNot bad signal, but the basis of how wifi shares the spectrum is time distribution.
- ipython 6y agoHigh jitter also occurs when the signal is marginal and the client scans the WiFi frequencies for other base stations to associate to (on the assumption that maybe you moved and there is another base station with a stronger signal). Since it has to “tune” into the other channels to listen for beacons, there will be a noticeable jitter while it is not tuned to the “current” channel. This is my understanding as I’m still learning. Fascinating this stuff works at all.
- jamroom 6y agoI use Jam Kazam weekly and with a non Wi-Fi connection I get really good results
- gabereiser 6y agoI mentioned JamKazam in this thread above about latency. It’s the top of my list for this purpose but still has some issues when the connection quality isn’t good (ISP issues)
- plorkyeran 6y agoMumble is in fact one of those audio-only options which can do 20-50ms latency, which is why the parent suggested it.
- nullc 6y ago> Latency will always be an issue here. No, it will not. :) You can get to 5ms above the network delay, even using compressed audio (opus), though some sound devices may be picky. Network delay can be just a few milliseconds even across a city, assuming that no latency murdering devices (wifi or nics in interrupt mitigation mode) are on the path. This means that you can have lower audio delay from a compressed audio conference crossing your state than is achieved from speed-of-sound delays from a performer sitting on the other side of a moderate sized room! The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed. (yet)
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago> Network delay can be just a few milliseconds even across a city If you limit your collaboration radius in that way, then sure (though it still depends on the router technology the packets encounter along the way). But if you want to go beyond that, the numbers get bigger. For transcontinental stuff, much much longer. But thanks for correcting the basic thrust.
- nullc 6y agoOne way delay between San Francisco and New York city is 37ms across the public internet today. This is the same one way delay as sound in air across 12 meters, which would be on the large size for an orchestra pit. It does get larger as you go further, but live performance with people on the other side of a large continent is completely realistic and has been done. :) Sure, expecting to go between NYC and someone in china behind the GFW is probably asking too much for a seamless experience. But many people mostly want to work with people in the same country as them ... and for that, with sufficient technology, latency need not be an issue.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago> live performance with people on the other side of a large continent is completely realistic and has been done. :) In case you're not aware, I'm the original author of JACK, around which JackTrip is built, which is the most likely and reliable tool for such a collaboration. I certainly know people who've done this, and I regret that I didn't realize back in February how useful it would have been to make something like JackTrip into a much easier-to-use tool for computer-naive folks. 37ms cross-country in the USA is optimistic, but certainly possible. US->Europe is not so great.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Sesse__ 6y agoTry Sonobus or JamKazam (the former is FOSS). Actually designed for the “playing together” use case.
- noman-land 6y agoI gotta mention JackTrip in this thread. You can stream full quality audio with near zero latency. If you're within a ~300 mile radius of your peer, it boasts <20ms latency, which is low enough to feel instant. I've tried it with a friend and it's pretty incredible. https://news.stanford.edu/2020/09/18/jacktrip-software-allows-musicians-sync-performances-online/ https://news.stanford.edu/2020/09/18/jacktrip-software-allow...
- luplex 6y agoMy dad uses https://www.soundjack.eu/ https://www.soundjack.eu/ running on a Raspberry Pi to practice with his wind quartet. along with a separate video call so they can see each other. Its also a peer2peer system, and not easy to set up correctly.
- zinekeller 6y agoWell, considering that ping times can be still abysmal due to your ISP's incompetence... Some tests that focus on interconnection issues (ISP to another ISP): Continuous To Azure: https://azurespeedtest.azurewebsites.net/ https://azurespeedtest.azurewebsites.net/ To AWS: https://awsspeedtest.xvf.dk/ https://awsspeedtest.xvf.dk/ One-time To Cloudflare: https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ To Netflix (maybe misleading due to direct interconnectivity in some ISPs): https://fast.com/ https://fast.com/
- wilburm 6y agoI’ve read that setup was non-trivial. How did you find it?
- noman-land 6y agoIt is pretty painful to set up, that's for sure. You need to be comfortable with the command line so I haven't been able to experiment yet with non-computer friends. I'm going to try to create some sort of one-liner setup script for my friends to use but I haven't gotten there yet. There are some good instructions here for different systems. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/jacktrip/ https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/jacktrip/
- laurieg 6y agoI second this. Mumble across different continents has less latency than Zoom in the same city.
- powersnail 6y agoVisual cue is important in playing music together. Unless everyone just jam to a click track instead of each other, it's very hard to play together without seeing the body language.
- Pxtl 6y agoI'm sure somebody could figure out a webapp that's nothing but a globally synchronized metronome.
- powersnail 6y agoThat's pretty much a click track. It works, but it's a bit boring that way. You can't make phrasing choices as freely.
- ilumanty 6y agoSome friends of mine had a pretty low latency (sub 50ms) using Jamulus (https://github.com/corrados/jamulus https://github.com/corrados/jamulus), which is an open source conferencing tool specially made for musicians. Need to self-host though.
- jjulius 6y ago>Try turning off video... I'm a musician and I'm incredibly confused by this point. Music instruction cannot possibly be effective without a visual component, regardless of whether it's a solo instruction or a group. An A/V method with a bit of latency is almost always going to be superior to audio-only.
- underyx 6y agoWith one group of friends I’ve been doing weekly calls for months now with audio through Mumble for audio, and video through Discord where everyone stays muted.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- johannes1234321 6y agoAre you doing instructions, including "your hand position isn't right" etc.? For that latency is tolerable, but different alten y for picture and audio is problematic.
- underyx 6y agoSometimes, but only for drinking games and such.
- dialamac 6y ago> Music instruction cannot possibly be effective without a visual component I suppose blind people will never be successful with music.
- cush 6y agoI think they were referring to remote music instruction....
- jjulius 6y agoPlease re-read my post and note that, at the beginning of the sentence you quoted, I specifically targeted the instruction of music. More specifically, you cannot help teach a blind violinist how to prevent themselves from continuously playing their notes flat without being able to see how they are playing. Blind people are perfectly capable of learning to play music. Blind people and non-blind people alike can learn on their own, or seek out instruction. It is the latter that we are discussing here.
- bit_logic 6y agoI was thinking recently on how bad modern voice calls are. It's all highly compressed and basically unidirectional, forcing the participants to take turns talking. The old analog POTS phone system wasn't like this. It had that feeling of almost being in the same room, no latency, true birectional conversation. I was wondering if there's anything that tries to get close to this old POTS level of quality, at the cost of higher bandwidth and processing power. Can some of the software mentioned in this thread achieve this?
- bombcar 6y agoMumble can get very close if you tune it right. To make it work well you Amy have to turn off lots of helpful processing that modern systems do.
- ghostpepper 6y agoDo you happen to know of any guides to doing this, or what specific settings/optimizations cause the most latency?
- newsclues 6y agoCompressed cellular audio vs good landlines is a world of difference... and the modern cellular sound still sucks
- sneak 6y agoThe way to do it now is to make calls using an app via IP; FaceTime Audio is remarkably good even over 4G.
- spoonjim 6y agoSadly for some moronic reason FaceTime can’t use hardwired Ethernet. I have a reliable 4ms ping and Apple sells Ethernet adapters for iPads but FaceTime won’t use them.
- cush 6y ago
- coldtea 6y agoBecause turning off video makes it useless for a music instruction tele-conference app -- which is all about the instructor being able to see how you sit, how you use your fingers, show you fingerings, point mistakes, and so on. In other words, they don't want a real time music streaming app, they want a music teaching app. Duh!
- ska 6y agoOne of their problems was they wanted video as well. They had already tried separate audio solutions, and found it lacking. This makes sense if you are trying to teach, you need to see the techniques not just hear them.
- 4f77616973 6y agoRiot (Matrix) too!
- brundolf 6y agoEngineers often discount the value of discoverability and accessibility. I would argue those are the main reasons Zoom became ubiquitous in the first place.
- Pxtl 6y agoMumble has excellent audio quality but it's marred by its lack of feedback cancellation. Mumble is basically unusable if anybody isn't using a headset to listen. Which may be tied to its low latency... I assume there are algorithmic reasons why cancellation needs latency. That and between the audio setup wizard and its unorthodox auth system, the onboarding process is brutal for non-technical users.
- pishpash 6y agoBecause it's for speech. Read the article, it talks about echo cancellation and compression, none of which you want for music.
- smolder 6y agoMumble is probably not the right software given the purpose built ones that exist. Jamkazam is one. There are many. The apparent ignorance about existing tools in this story and comment section is driving me nuts.
- andrewzah 6y agoThis is basically HN anytime anything related to audio engineering pops up. I'm sure nobody has thought of trying to address things like latency.