8 ms·

SonoBus: High-quality, low-latency peer-to-peer audio

106 points by lazyjeff 4y ago

speps 4y ago
Not taking anything away from the free product, it looks like a nice UI (using JUCE) on top of AoO [1] (Audio over OSC, the peer-to-peer audio part). [1] https://github.com/essej/aoo https://github.com/essej/aoo
- 0x69420 4y ago
  "Part of the myth is thinking that packaging is technology. [...] Microsoft Windows is packaging and conventions. The Macintosh is packaging and conventions. The World Wide Web is packaging and conventions. Underneath these wrappers are the real technologies: TCP/IP, DNS, graphical displays, [...] compression, payment mechanisms, encryption, and so on, but the wrapper is what people see." -Ted Nelson [1] that being said, this is one bit of “packaging” im particularly grateful for -- by complete coincidence, i found it a few days ago, and the fact that the app is free* and available everywhere means i can finally use my phone as an audio receiver for any computer†. now i can listen to talks with slides on a big screen while i cook or clean at antisocial hours, and let the rest of the house sleep without having to buy a bluetooth DAC (or a pair of wireless headphones‡) actually kind of funny -- other solutions to this exist on ios but they are in fact paid apps. same goes for various bits of “packaging” that solve similarly trivial problems, which was a part of growing up with apple stuff that was always deeply insulting to me. i recently came across someone singing the praises of a safari extension for user styles. it is two dollars and ninety nine cents on the mac app store. christ. i hope the grift goes well for the author, we've all got to get by somehow, but good fucking lord * actually free, as in no strings attached, open source, not freemium adware, not sending 24kbps opus of everything that goes through it to some adtech firm's speech recognition neural net † ive janked together things like an icecast instance -> mobile safari before, but good lord the latency is ass ‡ headphones are such amazing consumer tech. they do not go bad by default. cans from the 80s sound just as good in 2022. wireless headphones throw this out the window and slap an expiration date on. i categorically object on principle [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk
  - dwohnitmok 4y ago
    I'll the contrarian stance. Through a certain lens, packaging is technology, technology is packaging. The two are indistinguishable. TCP/IP is merely a given package of conventions around how bytes should be ordered. Compression even more so! Encryption is likewise just a set of conventions and packaging around how to transmit bytes. So on and so forth. In the physical domain this holds true as well. Any given piece of physical equipment is merely a packaging and rearrangement of other physical components together. Okay so what's the upshot of all this besides word games? By thinking of technology as simply packaging, we can reuse a lot of the prior work that people use to create packaging in how we think about technology as well as explain a lot of technological trends by analogy with how packaging works. We also should realize the opposite direction as well: a lot of packaging concerns are fundamentally the same as technological concerns and many similar trade-offs are made.
    - 0x69420 4y ago
      i am in full agreement that, for instance, a shell script consisting of grep piped into sed is as deserving of being called a “program” as grep and sed themselves are it does come down to where you draw the line, though -- is a PaaS subscription plan technology? not the infra behind PaaS firm's epic load balancer that lets them provision leanly and fatten their margins. not the javascript minifier that does its damned best to cut down time from link clicked to prices and features in browser viewport with animated gradients in background. not even the spreadsheet from the accountant who drafted up expected returns across a range of pricing schemes. but the subscription plan itself. that thing, which we conveniently refer to as a package pretty often. is it also technology?
      - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
        turtles all the way down?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - dwohnitmok 4y ago
- spacechild1 4y ago
  Hey, original author of AoO here. Don't underestimate the value of good UI design! Also, Sonobus offers a few additional goodies, such as mixing/routing, FX, recording to disk, etc. IMO, jesse does a fantastic job.
  - em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
    Definately. It seems like I've only been able to get friends with engineering degrees to operate something like JackTrip. But SonoBus I can get regular musicians to use.
seba_dos1 4y ago
How does it compare to Jamulus for remote jam session use case?
- lazyjeff 4y ago
  I'm not the developer, but he (Jesse) spoke in my class over a year ago. So hopefully I'm conveying this correctly -- my impression is he felt it was pretty close for live jamming but depends on a lot of conditions (ping latency, ethernet vs wifi, how many people are in the session). But what I can say for sure is it makes conversations feel a lot more intimate.
  - nemetroid 4y ago
    That’s what Jamulus does, too.
- 0x69420 4y ago
  jamulus is positioned as a 21st century take on the conference call jam session; it has a vaguely skeuomorphic mixer like you'd see in a DAW and so on. sonobus on the other hand is a lot more application-agnostic in its presentation
- krnlpnc 4y ago
  Both are highly sensitive to latency Ninjam/jamtaba on the other hand is not
  - spacechild1 4y ago
    Ninjam is a neat idea, but it's not really a realtime audio streaming solution (audio is delayed by a whole bar, iirc)
erwinkle 4y ago
Wouldn't this name be a copyright infringement given it's for high quality audio streaming?
- loeg 4y ago
  I'm guessing you mean trademark, not copyright -- copyright does not make sense in the context used -- but I'm not sure why you think it would be trademark infringement.
  - 0x69420 4y ago
    perhaps they meant something like “hmm, couldnt streaming copyrighted music using this app constitute a violation of rightsholders' intellectual property?”, which, on the one hand: haha; on the other hand: lmao
  - dsmmcken 4y ago
    My guess is they are referring to the similarity between the name Sonos and SonoBus.
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      Absolutely. Almost certainly problematic as one of Sonus’ leading value props is exactly this function - audio sync across their ecosystem.
      - raggi 4y ago
        if they want to keep it, they should come up with a viable long term business model, because obsoleting hardware isn't it. otherwise their threat hopefully will vaporize eventually, along with their non-ip stranglehold.
  - penneyd 4y ago
    I was about to write a comment about how I'm not supporting a company that ruined by Google Home speaker group functionality so yeah I think Sonos would have a pretty good trademark infringement case here.
sowbug 4y ago
The Features/Tips/User Guide/Download header is slightly broken. The Features anchor appends a fragment to the current URL, which produces .../linux.html#features on the Linux download page.
Eduard 4y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148527
NHQ 4y ago
I recently made a P2P audio broadcast app, also HD quality, and low latency, and it runs in all major browsers, including mobile, no app download. It also supports listener call-ins, and music/file streaming in the mix. What should I do with this technology?
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  Selfishly let me use it to run the live call-in podcast that I have wanted to run for a long time :-)
  - NHQ 4y ago
    I'm not prepared for testing and debugging at real-world breadth!
    - jimkleiber 4y ago
      haha, I hear you on that. I hope one day you will be and wish you the best :-)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- loxias 4y ago
  Open source it, so I can see if it's a good home for some of MY ideas in a lowest-possible-latency audio over lossy network R&D/code I've been half-ass building for a decade now. ;-) Though perhaps not, as I'm guessing making it browser based and cross platform removes the ability to do lots of the things that drive down latency.
  - NHQ 4y ago
    My stock assumption is that most people will have perfectly adequate network bandwidth for good quality audio streaming. Most of connected world already does. My mobile to mobile tests have been as good I as could want.
amluto 4y ago
Can this interoperate with AVB? Are there plans for that? Gadgets like this look promising: https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/spk-4p-poe-avb-speaker-detail https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/spk-4p-...
- loxias 4y ago
  Technically, yes, it can interop with AVB. Might require budget though.
imtringued 4y ago
I think it is insulting that Bluetooth basically gave up on this. It is faster to send an audio signal around the planet once than to send it from your phone to your ear with the worst Bluetooth profile.

106 points by lazyjeff 4y ago

Not taking anything away from the free product, it looks like a nice UI (using JUCE) on top of AoO [1] (Audio over OSC, the peer-to-peer audio part). [1] https://github.com/essej/aoo https://github.com/essej/aoo

0x69420 4y ago
"Part of the myth is thinking that packaging is technology. [...] Microsoft Windows is packaging and conventions. The Macintosh is packaging and conventions. The World Wide Web is packaging and conventions. Underneath these wrappers are the real technologies: TCP/IP, DNS, graphical displays, [...] compression, payment mechanisms, encryption, and so on, but the wrapper is what people see." -Ted Nelson [1] that being said, this is one bit of “packaging” im particularly grateful for -- by complete coincidence, i found it a few days ago, and the fact that the app is free* and available everywhere means i can finally use my phone as an audio receiver for any computer†. now i can listen to talks with slides on a big screen while i cook or clean at antisocial hours, and let the rest of the house sleep without having to buy a bluetooth DAC (or a pair of wireless headphones‡) actually kind of funny -- other solutions to this exist on ios but they are in fact paid apps. same goes for various bits of “packaging” that solve similarly trivial problems, which was a part of growing up with apple stuff that was always deeply insulting to me. i recently came across someone singing the praises of a safari extension for user styles. it is two dollars and ninety nine cents on the mac app store. christ. i hope the grift goes well for the author, we've all got to get by somehow, but good fucking lord * actually free, as in no strings attached, open source, not freemium adware, not sending 24kbps opus of everything that goes through it to some adtech firm's speech recognition neural net † ive janked together things like an icecast instance -> mobile safari before, but good lord the latency is ass ‡ headphones are such amazing consumer tech. they do not go bad by default. cans from the 80s sound just as good in 2022. wireless headphones throw this out the window and slap an expiration date on. i categorically object on principle [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  I'll the contrarian stance. Through a certain lens, packaging is technology, technology is packaging. The two are indistinguishable. TCP/IP is merely a given package of conventions around how bytes should be ordered. Compression even more so! Encryption is likewise just a set of conventions and packaging around how to transmit bytes. So on and so forth. In the physical domain this holds true as well. Any given piece of physical equipment is merely a packaging and rearrangement of other physical components together. Okay so what's the upshot of all this besides word games? By thinking of technology as simply packaging, we can reuse a lot of the prior work that people use to create packaging in how we think about technology as well as explain a lot of technological trends by analogy with how packaging works. We also should realize the opposite direction as well: a lot of packaging concerns are fundamentally the same as technological concerns and many similar trade-offs are made.
  - 0x69420 4y ago
    i am in full agreement that, for instance, a shell script consisting of grep piped into sed is as deserving of being called a “program” as grep and sed themselves are it does come down to where you draw the line, though -- is a PaaS subscription plan technology? not the infra behind PaaS firm's epic load balancer that lets them provision leanly and fatten their margins. not the javascript minifier that does its damned best to cut down time from link clicked to prices and features in browser viewport with animated gradients in background. not even the spreadsheet from the accountant who drafted up expected returns across a range of pricing schemes. but the subscription plan itself. that thing, which we conveniently refer to as a package pretty often. is it also technology?
    - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
      turtles all the way down?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dwohnitmok 4y ago
spacechild1 4y ago
Hey, original author of AoO here. Don't underestimate the value of good UI design! Also, Sonobus offers a few additional goodies, such as mixing/routing, FX, recording to disk, etc. IMO, jesse does a fantastic job.
- em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
  Definately. It seems like I've only been able to get friends with engineering degrees to operate something like JackTrip. But SonoBus I can get regular musicians to use.

seba_dos1 4y ago

How does it compare to Jamulus for remote jam session use case?

lazyjeff 4y ago
I'm not the developer, but he (Jesse) spoke in my class over a year ago. So hopefully I'm conveying this correctly -- my impression is he felt it was pretty close for live jamming but depends on a lot of conditions (ping latency, ethernet vs wifi, how many people are in the session). But what I can say for sure is it makes conversations feel a lot more intimate.
- nemetroid 4y ago
  That’s what Jamulus does, too.
0x69420 4y ago
jamulus is positioned as a 21st century take on the conference call jam session; it has a vaguely skeuomorphic mixer like you'd see in a DAW and so on. sonobus on the other hand is a lot more application-agnostic in its presentation
krnlpnc 4y ago
Both are highly sensitive to latency Ninjam/jamtaba on the other hand is not
- spacechild1 4y ago
  Ninjam is a neat idea, but it's not really a realtime audio streaming solution (audio is delayed by a whole bar, iirc)

erwinkle 4y ago

Wouldn't this name be a copyright infringement given it's for high quality audio streaming?

loeg 4y ago
I'm guessing you mean trademark, not copyright -- copyright does not make sense in the context used -- but I'm not sure why you think it would be trademark infringement.
- 0x69420 4y ago
  perhaps they meant something like “hmm, couldnt streaming copyrighted music using this app constitute a violation of rightsholders' intellectual property?”, which, on the one hand: haha; on the other hand: lmao
- dsmmcken 4y ago
  My guess is they are referring to the similarity between the name Sonos and SonoBus.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Absolutely. Almost certainly problematic as one of Sonus’ leading value props is exactly this function - audio sync across their ecosystem.
    - raggi 4y ago
      if they want to keep it, they should come up with a viable long term business model, because obsoleting hardware isn't it. otherwise their threat hopefully will vaporize eventually, along with their non-ip stranglehold.
- penneyd 4y ago
  I was about to write a comment about how I'm not supporting a company that ruined by Google Home speaker group functionality so yeah I think Sonos would have a pretty good trademark infringement case here.

sowbug 4y ago

The Features/Tips/User Guide/Download header is slightly broken. The Features anchor appends a fragment to the current URL, which produces .../linux.html#features on the Linux download page.

Eduard 4y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148527

NHQ 4y ago

I recently made a P2P audio broadcast app, also HD quality, and low latency, and it runs in all major browsers, including mobile, no app download. It also supports listener call-ins, and music/file streaming in the mix. What should I do with this technology?

jimkleiber 4y ago
Selfishly let me use it to run the live call-in podcast that I have wanted to run for a long time :-)
- NHQ 4y ago
  I'm not prepared for testing and debugging at real-world breadth!
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    haha, I hear you on that. I hope one day you will be and wish you the best :-)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
loxias 4y ago
Open source it, so I can see if it's a good home for some of MY ideas in a lowest-possible-latency audio over lossy network R&D/code I've been half-ass building for a decade now. ;-) Though perhaps not, as I'm guessing making it browser based and cross platform removes the ability to do lots of the things that drive down latency.
- NHQ 4y ago
  My stock assumption is that most people will have perfectly adequate network bandwidth for good quality audio streaming. Most of connected world already does. My mobile to mobile tests have been as good I as could want.

amluto 4y ago

Can this interoperate with AVB? Are there plans for that? Gadgets like this look promising: https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/spk-4p-poe-avb-speaker-detail https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/spk-4p-...

loxias 4y ago
Technically, yes, it can interop with AVB. Might require budget though.

imtringued 4y ago

I think it is insulting that Bluetooth basically gave up on this. It is faster to send an audio signal around the planet once than to send it from your phone to your ear with the worst Bluetooth profile.