#1

hope everyone is staying safe and well. apologies if this isn’t the right place for this inquiry.

i’m sure many of you are dealing with what i and my peers have been going through - shows, even small ones, getting canceled. people apprehensive to go see music. everyone wanting to hunker down and stay quarantined until there’s some better news on the horizon.

i and many of my peers would like to organize something in the interim - a ton of short solo shows, live-streamed to each other in some kind of organized video (or audio) chat. are there any platforms out there that are specifically good for this? i use zoom for company meetings and know it can share screens and feature the video of a person speaking, etc. the idea would be to set up set times, have everyone join the group, and pass the host / featured video and/or audio feed around the performers.

is this possible? are there any good ways to do this? i know there’s no way i’m the only one to think of this. does anyone have any suggestions of software to use for this kind of thing?

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#2

I wouldn’t rely on the video streams to carry the audio, I haven’t used anything that even remotely works for time-sensitive material.

I’ve been to a couple of gigs with people split across the Atlantic, using SuperCollider. It felt like witnessing magic. TidalCyles users are fond of Troop, but I don’t know how that performs over long distance.

Edit: Obviously these only carry control information and won’t teleport your audio in time. Ignore me (unless you use SC - maybe we get a surge in livecoding out of covid-19!)

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#3

I have setup something in this vain - icecast (http://icecast.org/) running on linux server, butt (http://danielnoethen.de/butt/) as a client for performers to connect to server and broadcast music and simple html5 web page with audio element pointing to icecast stream so anyone using computer/smartphone/anything_else_with_browser can listen.

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#4

I was just thinking of planning a live stream of a show to replace one of the (many) cancellations. Would love to avoid FB live.
Watching this topic with interest.

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#5

Icecast is great, not too difficult to setup on a linux server and there are loads of clients that you can use to stream to it. If you are a PureData user there is also the pdogg external to stream directly.

I’ve used it a bunch for some installations, and other web audio experiemnts. Also though it would be fun to write in a little ice streamer into Norns…

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#6

Maybe Discord screen share, for those who work primarily on laptops? You can now stream to up to 50 people on there.

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#7

Eulerroom Equinox is streaming four days of live coding music & visuals in just a few days. Tune in!

Having participated in the past (not this time, out of practice & caught the modular bug), this involves mainly setting up OBS on the individual level & then coordinating around a shared channel (in this case the Eulerroom channel). Quality can vary depending on each individual setup/circumstance but is generally good. Some services will have an option to archive so that past performances can be viewed which is great.

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#8

The tricky thing here seems to be the server part. I wouldn’t know where to start to set something up and would likely have to rely on a “corporate” offering like Youtube. Though maybe there are some easy solutions out there which I’m not aware of?

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#9

You all should look into Twitch. I’ve watched many live stream music shows on there. Seems to work great and has a little chat too.

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#10

you have a specific setup for twitch? I’d be particularly interested on how to stream from OSX-internal software (e.g. SuperCollider)

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#11

I have never put out content myself. Just watched others. I think they’d have all the specs on the site. It is made for gamers to stream their playing so I assume it can transmit internal audio idk. Only thing is, I’ve never seen “passing” the stream to someone else.

#12

@LFSaw i found it pretty easy to use JACK and OBS on linux
(OBS can stream to different services including twitch, youtube)
dunno about mac though…
https://obsproject.com/

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#13

I’ve used Soundflower with OBS on OSX, and have been hearing great things about BlackHole as a replacement for Soundflower

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#14

I’ve been using Blackhole for a while, it’s great!

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#15

I’ve been feeling like this crisis is a kind of primer for the coming climate apocalypse and the information in this thread is therefore very relevant to our needs. Thank you.

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#16

Another option:

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#17

this looks interesting… i had intended to just schedule a bunch of solo sets, but this could be even better. and maybe digital human interaction is more ideal. thanks!

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#18

I’ll also mention that the jamtaba client has added webcam support, so it’s pretty great for a music oriented get together on multiple levels.

Please feel free to make use of beepboop.fm port 2049 if you wish. There’s a bot in there that announces presence to the disquiet slack, so there’s a chance someone will join you even if you enter spontaneously.

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#19

I’ll echo the comments regarding OBS.

Most streaming platforms are supported (youtube, facebook, periscope, twitch) and due to the popularity of streaming in the gaming community, there is a lot of information about how to set it up on OSX, Linux or Windows.

It can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it.

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#20

I like this thread. Just registered for twitch and downloaded OBS. No luck getting audio from vcv rack into OBS yet but hopefully I’m almost there…

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