Looking for good ways to stream real time audio in order to better jam with others - preferably not subscription based

So a friend and I are wanting to jam in real time. We managed to set up our midi easily to where he can play midi in my daw from across the internet, now all we need to do is figure out the best ways to setup an audio stream we both can hear, so he can hear what he is doing. We are cool with it being low quality streaming as it's more about feedback on his end, and I'll be adding FX and such in my DAW. He will be playing on keyboard and reacting to it. Basically jamming.

We were thinking of trying to use Zoom or something, but I imagine there must be better ways to do this. We also see there are subscription model services, and we MAY end up having to use it, but we do not need to if we can find something that is either: 

1. Free
2. is a one time payment deal

I mean we just need to stream low latency audio for him to be able to know what I am doing.

maybe something like sonobus?

https://sonobus.net/

Ninjam.  Works great, been doing it weekly for over two years. Free, open source, Reaper includes a really good client and they are maintaining the code now.

For video, Zoom and similar are kind of high overhead and the latency isn't great.  Use VDOninja. Peer to peer, overhead is almost zero (depends very much on the browser you use, though - Chrome is a big resource hog, for example), can get latency in the milliseconds.

The tools you would normally use for regular livestreaming are mostly garbage for time critical stuff (except OBS, obviously).  Any service that claims you can get low enough latency over the Internet for true real-time playing is lying.  You need a gap system like Ninjam uses. 

  On 8/20/2022 at 2:54 AM, TubularCorporation said:

Ninjam.  Works great, been doing it weekly for over two years. Free, open source, Reaper includes a really good client and they are maintaining the code now.

 

For video, Zoom and similar are kind of high overhead and the latency isn't great.  Use VDOninja. Peer to peer, overhead is almost zero (depends very much on the browser you use, though - Chrome is a big resource hog, for example), can get latency in the milliseconds.

 

The tools you would normally use for regular livestreaming are mostly garbage for time critical stuff (except OBS, obviously).  Any service that claims you can get low enough latency over the Internet for true real-time playing is lying.  You need a gap system like Ninjam uses. 

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We are gonna try Ninjam tomorrow. Thanks for the recommendation.

ATM we are looking to get low latency audio simply  so he can hear what he is doing on my end. We need it mostly so he can hear what he is doing as I am the one with the FX and plugins and all that stuff, and he is the person playing. So it may be a bit awkward, lol. Hopefully we will find a comfortable solution, ninjam may be it.

  On 8/19/2022 at 7:00 AM, iococoi said:

maybe something like sonobus?

https://sonobus.net/

We will check this one out, and also ninjam. Seems what we may be looking for. I'm happy we don't have to go with a subscription service.

If you need low latency audio but don't need perfect sync, VDOninja will do that for sure, you'd just need something to route your audio (DAW output direct to webcam source for VDOninja, if you use your main system audo you'd end up with a feedback loop if you needed two-way communication), probably one of the Voicemeeter programs https://vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/index.htm if you'r ein Windows (or maybe Jack), and I think MacOS can do this natively.  Worst case scenario you have to route it to OBS and use that as a virtual webcam.  But you'd end up with really low latency compared to anything else I've tried, without paying for a commercial service.

By the way, if you try the moe Ninjam has that's for collaborating remotely on multitrack projects live (instead of realtime playing) let me know how it works.  I still haven't tried that and the instructions for doing it are kind of cryptic.

  On 8/20/2022 at 8:13 AM, Brisbot said:

We are gonna try Ninjam tomorrow. Thanks for the recommendation.

ATM we are looking to get low latency audio simply  so he can hear what he is doing on my end. We need it mostly so he can hear what he is doing as I am the one with the FX and plugins and all that stuff, and he is the person playing. So it may be a bit awkward, lol. Hopefully we will find a comfortable solution, ninjam may be it.

We will check this one out, and also ninjam. Seems what we may be looking for. I'm happy we don't have to go with a subscription service.

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hey did you have any success with either of these - ninjam or sonobus? I'm looking to try this remote jam thing with someone. no midi though, will be all live playing instruments - guitar, bass, drums, type thing

  On 9/30/2022 at 11:48 PM, zero said:

hey did you have any success with either of these - ninjam or sonobus? I'm looking to try this remote jam thing with someone. no midi though, will be all live playing instruments - guitar, bass, drums, type thing

We did try it and got it to work but never got to a full session. Sonobus definitely was the answer though. The issue is getting past the latency. We had 200 ms latency tho my internet is questionablle and his is as well, and we were halfway across the world. You can jam in a rudimentary way with it. rtpMidi was the answer to our midi issue.

Sonobus will rely best on a good internet. And it was an easy setup. Just read instructions, setup, manual, etc ahead of time to make the process easier. If you guys have good internet with ok latency between each other you may  find a way to jam.

You should really try Ninjam, if the way you play allows the gap system to work you don't have to deal with conventional latency at all. The only thing I've needed to do is shift my clock a little early to compensate for interface and plugin latency, otherwise my actual audio will be a ittle behind the Ninjam clock But that's not a network issue at all, it's latency compensation (except it's being manually applied live, instead of calcualted and aplied to a recording after the fact like normal DAW latency compensation).

200ms sounds horrible, my timing starts to suffer in the 6-12ms range, although even down around 4-5ms it's noticeable (but not really any different than playing a warehouse show where you're 20+ feet from the monitors half the time).

Even with a VDOninja peer to peer connection, I've never gotten latency below 150-200ms (usually it's more like 300ms) between the USA and France (which is the only thing I've tried) so 200ms seems like a pretty good number, I just can't imagine having to play around that.  But on the other hand, I can't imagine trying to play certain types of music with Ninjam,either, so I guess it depends.

  On 10/3/2022 at 12:46 AM, Brisbot said:

Sonobus will rely best on a good internet. And it was an easy setup. Just read instructions, setup, manual, etc ahead of time to make the process easier. If you guys have good internet with ok latency between each other you may  find a way to jam.

Sonobus has worked out quite well for our purposes. the guy I jam with is on the west coast in Washington, and I'm in Texas. we did have to fiddle with the settings a bit in Sonobus the first time we tried it out, in order to reduce the latency factor. but seems to be fine now for live playing. and yeah it is really user friendly. create a private session, then both connect to it when we're ready to go.

I was initially concerned about using wifi vs. hard line internet connection after reading into it. but I'm just on wifi with around 120mbps upload, not sure what his is. I use a fairly new laptop with windows 11, he uses some mac. we've jammed a few times now and I can't tell any delay/lag at all. we're keeping it pretty simple though. loop some drums, then mess around playing live bass and guitar parts over it. we're doing it with no web cam or facetime either, just text back and forth for communication.

so far I kinda prefer this than being in a room jamming with others. a lot of advantages, like not wasting time setting all your gear up. and you can hop on for 10-20 minutes, practice, then do it again later on when time allows. again, this works for me in what I'm looking to get out of this. 

The way I solved this was with Jammr. I haven't used it in a while and will be trying Jamulus with hosting my own server next.
Basically what I did was slave my hardware sequencer clock to Jammr's MIDI out, then routing the audio from my DAW (Renoise, which is just monitoring my hardware mix) into Jammr's audio in. After that just monitor Jammr's audio, and you're hearing your signal as well as your friend's synced perfectly. It's not very hi-fi but that's part of the fun, the fluctuating clock does some really fun stuff with BPM synced delays