The JackTrip Foundation is a newly formed non-profit organization dedicated to advancing technologies that enable music collaboration over the Internet, and to facilitate the creation of music that transcends distance constraints. The Covid-19 pandemic has tragically closed down many musical activities around the world, devastating musicians and music organizations alike. Unlike many business functions, which have pivoted quickly to Internet collaboration tools, the time delay inherent in Internet transmissions have precluded musicians from being able to make a similar transition online.
The mission of the JackTrip Foundation is to make the performance of music over the Internet feasible and accessible to everyone. By utilizing existing and newly-developed technologies aimed at reducing latency, the Foundation plans to develop and operate a music collaboration cloud service which will allow musicians to rehearse, perform and collaborate synchronously over common Internet connections.
JackTrip is a free, open source program authored by Chris Chafe and Juan Pablo Caceres at Stanford University. Many musicians use JackTrip because it was made for professional-quality sound and low latency, because it works with existing hardware and does not require any financial investment, and because its developers and others have created a supportive community around it.
Friday, October 30, 2020
The JackTrip Foundation
This is the best news ever for musicians in isolation!
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3 comments:
Online reviews of JackTrip by musicians are not so flattering; it's apparently more difficult to install and get running than its competitors. I have personal experience with two of its competitors, Jamulus and JamKazam.
Jamulus: I sing twice a month with Sacred Harp singers using Jamulus. Overall sound quality is adequate. Level of technical expertise required is relatively low, and equipment requirements are minimal. For singers all you need is a laptop with a built-in mic to get adequate sound, plus at least 200 Kbps upload and download speed, plus your computer must be wired into the modem using Ethernet (no wifi). A key issue for any of these platforms is "latency," or lag time; latency is measured in milliseconds, and one ms is about equivalent to being 1 foot away from another musician. Here in Silicon Valley we're getting overall latency of about 50 ms -- about like standing 50 feet from the other musicians, which is like sining in a big echo-y room and which favors slower tempos. (However, in the Philadelphia area latencies are reportedly lower, on the order of 15 ms -- the Internet infrastructure apparently is not as overloaded as in Silicon Valley.) We've had 20 people singing together using Jamulus.
JamKazam: My experience with JamKazam is that it's pretty finicky, and I found the learning curve was steep. Required bandwidth is also higher. I was getting latencies down around 30 ms, significantly less than Jamulus. And it's possible to get much lower than that. Some of the recordings I've heard that were made using JamKazam have quite good audio quality. In addition, Jam Kazam is (as far as I know) the only one of these platforms that allows video as well as audio. There's a trade-off for all this quality -- JamKazam maxes out at about 6-8 musicians, you need lots of bandwidth, and you're probably going to have to get an audio interface. However, if you're willing to invest plenty of time and money, you'll be able to do real-time online concerts with both audio and video.
JackTrip: It's obviusly very well funded (it's at Stanford), and it looks like they're in constant development, which is good. And maybe their technology has improved from when I was looking into it back in April. And rumor has it that they're offering lots of support to nonprofit performance groups. JackTrip reportedly can handle lots of musicians, just as Jamulus can. So it might be the right solution for some people.
Which option to choose? JackTrip seems to be targeting their support to nonprofit performance groups, so if I were in such a group I might start with JackTrip. For serious chamber musicians and small ensembles, my feeling is that investing the time and money in getting JamKazam to work would be well worth the investment. For ordinary amateur musicians, I feel Jamulus is the way to go right now; it's probably the easiest of the three to use, it's free, and there's a pretty big user community to help you out.
Downsides to making music online in real time: (1) You won't have any visual cues, which most of us depend on more than we realize. (2) Regardless of which platform you use, you have to get everyone in your group or ensemble set up with (a) cable or fiber Internet connection and no wireless ISPs; (b) Ethernet connection; (c) a relatively new modem (we've seen problems with modems more than 8 years old). (3) You will need extra patience and tolerance. (4) It is NOT the same as making music in person.
Upsides to making music online in real time: It feels unbelievably good to make music with other people in real time. No it's not as good as making music in person, but for many of us it's the best we have right now.
Thank you so much for this comment, Dan. The combination of lousy rural bandwidth, an old modem, and people I would want to play with who share the same limitations, makes me hesitant to go ahead with trying this.
If you ever decide to give it a try, I'd be happy to talk you through the basics of a Jamulus set-up -- it's the least I could do given all I've gotten from your blog over the years. You should have access to my email access in your blog's dashboard; if not, you can track me down through the link to my Web site.
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