JamKazam et al

mpointon posted on Apr 28, 2020 #1
mpointon
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Posts: 522
Joined: Feb 27, 2015
Has anyone had any 'real' success in using JamKazam? I spent a couple of very frustrating weeks trying to get it working, trying out all manner of increasingly-complex configurations. I got it working in the end - the complexity of 10 microphones being mixed is harder than you think. The developers just hadn't considered users being more than an instrument and a vocal mic...

After all that Herculean effort, I've just kinda given up with it. I had to, in the end, take a stereo mix from my Tascam 24, into my previous 8-in interface and then out again, back into the Model 24 to route through the submix buss so what I monitor is the latent, synchronised JamaKazam output. I had a test drive of it with Tof and Gijs from here but we ended up more frustrated than productive. I also tried it with a colleague who lives only about 20 miles away which should keep latency down. Fat chance.

In the end, no matter how clever your kit is - end-to-end, I was running at < 15ms which is as good as I'm going to get with my gear with ASIO running at the lowest possible buffer sizes. Thats from input to ASIO monitored output through the PC, via my secondary interface. Then along comes Mr Internet and converts that to c. 50-75ms real latency.

50ms is a LONG time in live music. My internet here runs at 70mbps down, 20mbps up - should be more than enough. Ping is c. 8ms.

In the end, whilst a 'fun' exercise in coming up with hugely complex audio routing for me where it's one button press away from completely feeding back on itself, ultimately the tech just isn't there or accessible enough for most. I'm highly technical, coming from software development, network infrastructure and systems administration and this was a challenge to say the least. It's too heavily reliant on everyone having impressive 'net connections.

A shame, but that's how it is. The *only* way I can see it truly working is to have one person 'conduct', not monitoring everyone else. In the case of a band, I'd say the drummer just shouldn't monitor anyone and just play the song in his or her head! Hardly fun.
+3
wjl posted on Apr 28, 2020 #2
wjl
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It would be nice if it worked. But I'm reading this since quite a time, and have never really seen a success story (the best examples were some friends living nearby each other, possibly on the same network provider even, who managed to get ~19ms. Too long to be really tight in my opinion, something under 10 would be better). And if you consider the speed of light going around earth about 7.5 times in one second (and as such, light having a latency around earth of about 130ms), I wonder if it's doable at all.

But the ad videos from JamKazam are nice - maybe we should do something like that for our offline sessions :)
+1
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wjl posted on Jun 7, 2020 #3
wjl
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Martin,

the current c't computer magazine in Germany has an article about some of these online jamming tools, and since you're using Reaper, have you tried Ninjam? I think that would probably work better then JamKazam since it works with a slight delay by design. Here's a video demonstrating it:

[youtube]aZ5UQhTRVZU[/youtube]

Just a thought, maybe that helps?

Cheers,
Wolfgang
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