#52

I havenā€™t tried using JackTrip in a few years but that is the highest quality way to go I think. Michael Dessen just posted a great playlist introducing the system and how it can be used.

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#53

I havenā€™t tried JackTrip and would like to.

Hereā€™s an approach Iā€™ve used a great deal and weā€™ve had a ton of fun with it:

3 Likes
#54

Thanks I am going to give that a go

#57

netpd is great and has just been updated! iā€™m trying to organise jams every monday round 23h00 utc+2 (time zone in France)

#59

Unfortunately about 3 hours left in my work day at that hour.

#60

argh, time zones make my brain hurt. if you can suggest a good time for where you are, on the weekend or something then let me know!

#61

This is a handy tool

Iā€™m usually up for a jam between 5pm and 3am UTC on weekend days, with a little advance warning.

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#62

thanks!
is that the same as between 3pm and 5pm UTC? now iā€™m really confused!

#63

Oops! Corrected my typo. 5pm-3am

#64

Hi, I just wanted to bring peopleā€™s attention to a system that is really very well adapted to collaborative music making in these days of social distancing, long hours at home, etc - Netpd (www.netpd.org). Itā€™s a system built in Pure Data that creates a connection between remote computers and syncs a shared set of instruments, effects, and sequencers.

netpd-in-action
netpd-in-action1680Ɨ1050 304 KB

It requires Pd Vanilla and a handful of externals (listed in the readme). Lots of help is available on the website.

If anyone is interested in getting organised to get a few people on it at the same time we can use this threadā€¦

ā€¦ or use the new dedicated netpd forum http://untalk.netpd.org/

3 Likes
#65

Definitely interested in getting in on this. Iā€™ve been interested such systems since the pandemic went down and would love to be a part of one that is already in such a mature state. I hadnā€™t heard of netpd until this post but it has certainly piqued my curiosity.

#66

great! if you have any problems setting it up or using it please post about it here so that we can help anyone else doing the sameā€¦

I recommend getting the netpd+instruments bundle from the netpd downloads page.
pd vanilla from here: https://puredata.info/downloads
the externals can be added using Pdā€™s ā€˜Help > Find Externalsā€™ function

  • binfile
  • else
  • iemnet
  • iemlib
  • osc
  • slip
  • zexy
#67

I have it running. Just waiting for someone to host a server :wink:

#69

netpd provides a server so nobody else has to (although the server setup can be downloaded from github if you do want to have a private server)!

if no-one else is logged on you can still play around with the instruments and whoever joins will then download those instruments when they ā€˜unpatchā€™

so, to give you the netpd basicsā€¦
main.pd launches netpd with a chat window
unpatch opens up the instrument panel.
the instruments:
ā€˜masterā€™ - start/stop and tempo
ā€˜mxā€™ - the mixer (add effects ā€˜e-libā€™, ā€˜rfxlibā€™, ā€˜dynlibā€™) (click aux for aux channels)
each synth (ā€˜sineā€™, ā€˜lilacidā€™, etc) has an unstep for sequencing or is triggered by ā€˜qseq3ā€™
live audio can be streamed with ā€˜evilā€™

this is all the ā€˜readymadeā€™ stuff but of course as it is pd the idea is also that you could build your own instruments and so on. they would just have to be given the netpd wrapper in order to become shareable.

#70

Because the software being used for remote choirs is LOW-latency, not NO-latency, perfect rhythmic unity is nearly impossible. Similarly, the unified choral sound typically asked for in traditional rep is also difficult to achieve. These two factors inspired C4 to curate, solicit, and create repertoire that embraces timbre, improvisation, and asynchronous performing, sometimes juxtaposing such sections with moments of metric unity in rhythmically simple and homophonic textures that donā€™t sound out of place with a little lag.

As Iā€™ve written about previously, such aleatoric writing where individual performers have some creative control over their parts is not new to the music world, but it is uncommon in much of the choral world. Ensembles interested in shifting to a remote choir format, however, seem to show a surge of interest in pieces that allow for dense textures outside of the stereotypical four-part polyphony.

I think itā€™s fascinating that the technical constraints of network music are inspiring new forms of composition.

On another topic: did anybody get a chance to check out the Network Music Festival last weekend? Iā€™m frustrated because my attention was elsewhere and so I missed itā€¦

https://networkmusicfestival.org/

#71

Iā€™ve been learning a lot about JackTrip and other audio streaming tools. Iā€™ve been very impressed with the cost effectiveness and ease of using a cloud server for setting up JackTrip network music sessions. Iā€™ve written up some instructions on how to do this in the gist below. I figure Iā€™d share here in case folks are interested in how to do it.

4 Likes
#72

I havenā€™t seen SonoBus mentioned here yet but Iā€™ve been experimenting with it. Itā€™s very promising and offers a more user friendly experience than JackTrip but is in some ways takes more fiddling to get low-latency. Iā€™ll likely write up a tutorial to get a SonoBus server working on Linux as well.

#73

@carltesta can put some numbers to ā€œlow latencyā€? Have you experimented with the effect of distance on latency?

One of the things I like about NINJAM is the ability to sync latency to a musical interval, but doing so suggests a certain cyclical style of composition. If I didnā€™t have ninjamā€™s ability to sync to the one, I might have to consider other adaptations to the effect of latency on the music (but Iā€™m a bit hard pressed to imagine what that might look like).

Would love to hear your thoughts about the musical implications of network music techniques.

#74

Last night I was testing sending audio back and forth from my home computer in southern CT to a dedicated server running in NYC, so a rough distance of about 80 miles and I was able to obtain less than 30ms roundtrip latency using SonoBus which is equivalent to what I was experiencing with JackTrip (JackTrip might be slightly faster).

Most of the music I do doesnā€™t rely on tight synchrony persay, though there is something to be said for the ability to quickly react to musicians in an improvised context even if a rhythmic unity isnā€™t required.

Iā€™ve never used NIMJAM, but syncing the latency to a musical interval sounds very useful.

Iā€™ve really only recently started to learn about network music techniques but I think that we are perhaps overly focused on achieving low latency in an attempt to do what we used to do musically (just transferred online) while ignoring the novel musical possibilities and questions that network music brings up. Iā€™m particularly interested in the collage possibilities of networked music and large numbers of people making sound together. Iā€™m also interested in distributed electronic instruments that can be controlled by a large number of people at once. @infinitedigits 's new norns.online is really starting to push this idea. If we can enable audio streaming to a website that is as close to realtime as JackTrip or SonoBus, then people could visit a website with instrument controls and hear the changes in realtime, they could also hear other people controlling the instrument as well at close to realtime. We seem very close to achieving this.

2 Likes
#75

I highly recommend downloading JamTaba and giving ninjam a try. Itā€™s kind of ā€œeasy modeā€ for all the things youā€™re describing. Since you have so much experience with JackTrip and SonoBus, Iā€™d love to hear your thoughts about whether low latency in the 30ms range, or much larger latency synced to the bar, provide more musical results.

I often collaborate with people thousands of miles away, which is another reason Iā€™m not really thinking too hard about low latency.

1 Like