My jamulus experience - duh!

[julietgreen 102]

Jamulus is a reasonable way to continue to interact with fellow musicians and actually broaden the network. I've been using it to play with the jazz band that I had recently joined just before Covid-19. It's kept some of us going - learning new stuff, even. Last week, I had a jam on sax, blowing through some standards with a bunch of complete strangers and we all said we would do that again this week. A couple of us (kb and sax) started it off in a 'room' and when other people saw that there was something going on, they joined us so that we ended up with a full band.

Delay and sound quality issues could put some people off. I found on occasions, playing busier riffs, that the sound coming back to my ears late made it almost impossible. The drummer in our jazz band doesn't listen to himself through the system, for this reason, though that is not advised. I've noticed that he tends to slow down through a number, because we're coming through late in his ears. Apparently the brain does eventually adjust as long as the delay isn't too high. My set-up operates at between 40 - 50ms which isn't great but it's not terrible. 20ms is good. If you lower the buffer size, you get a lower delay, but the sound quality goes, so it's a juggling act.

Every week, there's a group who hold an online streamed 'WorldJam' which is often excellent and involves random musicians from all over. I joined last week briefly on sax and again this week. Because they had technical hitches this week, they were pushed for time and didn't talk to each of the jammers. That's why I was called by the wrong name and missed the start of my solo and also why I hadn't noticed I had my 'mute myself' box checked and therefore couldn't be heard anyway! What an idiot! Still, I noticed that the eminent professors in the iSage conference kept forgetting to turn on their mics, so I'm not alone.

It's worth a try if you're missing playing with others. There is a preponderance of bassists, apparently. I wonder why that is.

[razze06 31]

Yep, lots of bass players on the public servers. Perhaps bassists are more inclined to try new things, and more persistent in getting things to work?

Personally only have good things to say about using jamulus. Sound quality is sometimes not great, but I found the overall experience is great.

[ordep 251]

been using jamulus with friends lately too. use zoom and a streaming app on a social media platform like facebook and you have a virtual live gig. 

[julietgreen 102]

On 25/08/2020 at 11:05, razze06 said:

Yep, lots of bass players on the public servers. Perhaps bassists are more inclined to try new things, and more persistent in getting things to work?

Personally only have good things to say about using jamulus. Sound quality is sometimes not great, but I found the overall experience is great.

Yep. It's getting better and better all the time with each update. A gift of a piece of software that isn't widely appreciated. I can see how it can become very useful for pre rehearsal rehearsals. Thrash it out on jamulus so that everyone knows the form etc. and then when it's more or less sorted, get together for the full rehearsal. Would save on fuel, time, studio fees etc. (when we eventually get back to in-person rehearsals)

[razze06 31]

I really enjoy the random jams on the public servers, and makes me think that my knowledge of standards is pathetic at best  

[petebassist 233]

@julietgreen thanks for the info it's great to hear that you're able to do this. I tried jamkazam earlier in the year without success, so I'll def be giving this a try.

[Willie 2]

I’m a drummer whose been using Jamulus weekly for a couple months. I recommend that everyone (singers & instruments) click the MUTE button on their own channel so that you don’t hear the latency echo of your own playing/singing. It will just mess up your timing if you hear a delayed echo of yourself. Another tip is to be ready to pull off your headphones if someone joins who is blasting feedback. It won’t happen if everyone is wearing headphones, but you might run into that on rare occasions. Or you can have everyone in your group click the SOLO button to isolate your group from drop-in musicians (if you are on a public server).

[razze06 31]

On 29/08/2020 at 07:11, Willie said:

I’m a drummer whose been using Jamulus weekly for a couple months. I recommend that everyone (singers & instruments) click the MUTE button on their own channel so that you don’t hear the latency echo of your own playing/singing. It will just mess up your timing if you hear a delayed echo of yourself. Another tip is to be ready to pull off your headphones if someone joins who is blasting feedback. It won’t happen if everyone is wearing headphones, but you might run into that on rare occasions. Or you can have everyone in your group click the SOLO button to isolate your group from drop-in musicians (if you are on a public server).

Interesting point. I would recommend the opposite, which is to only turn off direct monitoring and only hear the return signal from your instrument. In that way you can adjust your playing to compensate for latency. Of course that doesn't work for singing or acoustic instruments    

[julietgreen 102]

On 29/08/2020 at 07:11, Willie said:

I’m a drummer whose been using Jamulus weekly for a couple months. I recommend that everyone (singers & instruments) click the MUTE button on their own channel so that you don’t hear the latency echo of your own playing/singing. It will just mess up your timing if you hear a delayed echo of yourself. Another tip is to be ready to pull off your headphones if someone joins who is blasting feedback. It won’t happen if everyone is wearing headphones, but you might run into that on rare occasions. Or you can have everyone in your group click the SOLO button to isolate your group from drop-in musicians (if you are on a public server).

 

On 31/08/2020 at 14:39, razze06 said:

Interesting point. I would recommend the opposite, which is to only turn off direct monitoring and only hear the return signal from your instrument. In that way you can adjust your playing to compensate for latency. Of course that doesn't work for singing or acoustic instruments    

Agreed. You should try to hear the return signal if you can. The brain compensates for latencies after a while. The trick is to hang into the drummer. Even when I play sax, I try to turn up the return to drown out the live sound. I don't use the 'solo' button any more because I've been caught out in a live jam with people entering the room who I'd previously put on solo. It cuts out all the other feeds and everything goes silent. Now you can set new entrants to the room to come in at 0% or something which won't deafen you. Most recently I've played with a violinist in the states. He was using electric violin and managed to totally compensate for 140ms+ latency!

[razze06 31]

I'v found that playing with around 60ms latency gives my bass playing a good reggae/dub feel

[41Hz 68]

Pretty impressed with Jamulus.

I found logging into the router and turning WiFi off improved things much to the annoyance of my kids.

I’m interested to know what delays people are getting? 

Best case I’m at around 30mS overall going on the fastest 9-10mS public server - so presume about 20mS Introduced by my interface/software. Are any others getting better than this? Did wonder if a better interface would help.

[razze06 31]

my normal overall latency to cloud servers in the UK is around 30ms, which i find pefectly adequate for my playing.

[julietgreen 102]

On 08/11/2020 at 09:40, 41Hz said:

Pretty impressed with Jamulus.

I found logging into the router and turning WiFi off improved things much to the annoyance of my kids.

I’m interested to know what delays people are getting? 

Best case I’m at around 30mS overall going on the fastest 9-10mS public server - so presume about 20mS Introduced by my interface/software. Are any others getting better than this? Did wonder if a better interface would help.

Some people get lower latencies, but they're rare. A lot of people seem to operate without too much effort at around 40ms, so with 30 you're fine and you'll hardly notice it. My most recently jam was with someone in Minnesota and someone in St Petersburg with a few of us in the middle in the UK. That's not common - most people can't deal with those latencies, but the American guy is a master at it and the Russian is used to it now! I'll post the video when we've played our online gig.

[PatrickJ 895]

Right lockdown #3 is here and I'm not going to go another year without music so I'm going to try and get my psuedo band using Jamulus.

It could be an uphill battle ..

- drummer: highly skilled IT engineer but doesn't know what an audio interface is or what to do with it.
- guitarist: got his first PC this Christmas, although in fairness he has already got an audio interface and we did just test JamKazam.  Latency was an issue but he was on WiFi so we need to solve that problem.

I've got a Jamulus Server configured to run on my Laptop so we don't need to worry about the central servers (hopefully that will help with latency).  Once we've got their IT issues solved I'm hoping we can have some successful jams.

Edited January 8 by PatrickJ

[41Hz 68]

9 hours ago, PatrickJ said:

Right lockdown #3 is here and I'm not going to go another year without music so I'm going to try and get my psuedo band using Jamulus.

It could be an uphill battle ..

- drummer: highly skilled IT engineer but doesn't know what an audio interface is or what to do with it.
- guitarist: got his first PC this Christmas, although in fairness he has already got an audio interface and we did just test JamKazam.  Latency was an issue but he was on WiFi so we need to solve that problem.

I've got a Jamulus Server configured to run on my Laptop so we don't need to worry about the central servers (hopefully that will help with latency).  Once we've got their IT issues solved I'm hoping we can have some successful jams.

Our guitarist setup a server in his laptop, but to be honest it had more latency than some of the public ones. When I looked into it to get a low latency private server you need to setup a cloud based one. 
 

The other key thing is WiFi has too much jitter, so you must wire in direct with an Ethernet cable to your router. I bought a cheap 20M Ethernet cable from Amazon so I could route to my music room without moving the router.

[PatrickJ 895]

1 hour ago, 41Hz said:

Our guitarist setup a server in his laptop, but to be honest it had more latency than some of the public ones. When I looked into it to get a low latency private server you need to setup a cloud based one. 
 

The other key thing is WiFi has too much jitter, so you must wire in direct with an Ethernet cable to your router. I bought a cheap 20M Ethernet cable from Amazon so I could route to my music room without moving the router.

Interesting to know about the server - fortunately I work for a cloud compute company so running one on AWS or Azure isn't a problem and I had already considered doing that.

Yeah WiFi a big know.  He's going to try some Powerline adaptors first.

[julietgreen 102]

On 08/01/2021 at 23:05, PatrickJ said:

Right lockdown #3 is here and I'm not going to go another year without music so I'm going to try and get my psuedo band using Jamulus.

It could be an uphill battle ..

- drummer: highly skilled IT engineer but doesn't know what an audio interface is or what to do with it.
- guitarist: got his first PC this Christmas, although in fairness he has already got an audio interface and we did just test JamKazam.  Latency was an issue but he was on WiFi so we need to solve that problem.

I've got a Jamulus Server configured to run on my Laptop so we don't need to worry about the central servers (hopefully that will help with latency).  Once we've got their IT issues solved I'm hoping we can have some successful jams.

It's well worth persisting with. There are a lot of us playing in the WorldJam now and we are by no means a bunch of technical experts.

[razze06 31]

On 09/01/2021 at 10:00, PatrickJ said:

Interesting to know about the server - fortunately I work for a cloud compute company so running one on AWS or Azure isn't a problem and I had already considered doing that.

Yeah WiFi a big know.  He's going to try some Powerline adaptors first.

my experience is that powerline adapters add around 5ms to the ping time, and a significant amount of jitter, but they're better than wifi. Nowhere near as good as ethernet though.

[PatrickJ 895]

Successful Jamulus test this weekend just gone.

Both guitarist and I were able to successfully jam on the server I was running.  We're both using Powerlines - audio quality and lag both acceptable.  Next is to get drummer onboard.

[Jakester 259]

19 minutes ago, PatrickJ said:

Successful Jamulus test this weekend just gone.

Both guitarist and I were able to successfully jam on the server I was running.  We're both using Powerlines - audio quality and lag both acceptable.  Next is to get drummer onboard.

I'm going to have a crack at using it tomorrow night as a drummer. I have an XR18 but from what I've been seeing online about using that, I'm considering just using that to mix and using my mono interface using the headphone out from the mixer. Will report back to see how it goes! 

[Jakester 259]

No-go, i'm afraid, though not so much down to limitations with the software as with the user! 

I was hoping that I could use powerline adapters to connect to the router out in my mancave/studio, but I couldn't get any connection - I think because a new distribution board was put into the mancave when it was rewired, it's preventing the powerline jobbies from working - so no network out there (which is a real pain). Since I was playing drums rather than bass, it was a problem as I can't have the kit in the house! Managed to connect in the house but only through WiFi, which as they suggest, was useless. Ah well.