Grateful Dead Music Forum

So I'm looking to try and do some extra band work with various members online - What have you used and what do you recommend? I've seen a thread here discuss ejamming.com - there's also ninjam.com and I'd guess others as well.

Latency seems to be the primary issue - and free as opposed to a registration fee would be a bonus!

Any light anyone can shed on this will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Bill -

Hi. Not be be a kill joy, but I gave up on the ejamming application. It also happened to go to a fee based service at similar time but that is not the reason I dropped out. That service needed to install software driver shims, which I wasn't so keen on,though it did not appear to affect my computer. The setup and connection to the computer was always a problem. But as you say, delay is the main issue. I had one fairly successful interaction with a kid at a college in Ohio. That university had plenty of bandwidth and he had more problems with my relatively slow upload speed, so I did not hear much delay from him but he had more from me. We did get through a couple tunes, though. I tried with someone out in like Arizona and it did not work well at all. We both had cable modem services with relatively low upload speeds. Even though the speeds were quoted as being within the guidelines for two person use, the trans-continental delay made it awkward at best. Now unless the ejamming enterprise (or others) has paid for QoS services end to end between ISPs across the nation, I cannot understand how they would make this truly work. Perhaps they have enabled QoS and that is what you are in part paying for with the service.

I jammed with a guy in Turkey once. That was really weird and it almost, kinda worked. That was also at the infancy of the ejamming concept and not many folks were on board at that time, less than 2 dozen.

So I am interested in how it will work out for you. These are just my reflections as a network engineer and not meant to discourage you from trying. If you find a service that works, let me know. If you find a service with a trial period and you want to give it a shot, I would happily try. I am in PA and you are in NY (Westchester county? I used to live there many moons ago) so there should not be too many ISP hops in between. Of course that somewhat depends on your ISP and what tier level they are at. Mine is a tier three I believe, at least last time I checked.

All this said, I have not tried this in about 4 - 5 years. Best of luck with it and if you are intending to use it with folks local to your area, no matter what the service, you will likely have the best results.

Dave

Thanks for the input Dave - I wonder if the lack of input (from others obviously) is indicative of people not having tried it, or not having much to say about it. Hmmm...we'll probably give one of 'em a whirl just the same and see what happens.

Thanks again

Bill

I haven't tried any of them yet - let us know how it works out when you do.

Hey Bill - I have tried pretty much everything under the sun with one exception...oddly the one thing that is likely to work => http://www.musicianlink.com/ It is a hardware solution with specific requirements on DL & UL bandwidth (not to mention the hardware cost). I have spoken with people who have used it and they have no complaints. It certainly doesn't fit you hope for a free solution though!

ninjam - can lead to some really interesting jams but it is completely based on accepting that latency is apart of the process - so not "real-time" by design (think time shift to account for latency).

If you do uncover something I have missed please do let us know....I am not likely to make the rukind east get together.....but a virtual jam would be out of this world

Good luck!

jkstraw wrote:...oddly the one thing that is likely to work => http://www.musicianlink.com/ It is a hardware solution with specific requirements on DL & UL bandwidth (not to mention the hardware cost).

Interesting. I haven't searched for a while but did not get hits on this last night. Yeah, it is expensive, but no more than other toys or good effects boxes. The upstream bandwidth is the big question. It most likely will not work for cable modem subscribers or if they do have the 1 megabit upstream speed, it won't be a guaranteed data rate. Cool concept, though, a dedicated computer for this processing in a box. I noted no compression so that is why the bandwidth requirement and the reduced latency. So for those who are within 500 Internet circuit miles and have FIOS, you should be good to go with this rig.

A country boy like me has little hope. I waited 8 years for 2-way cable w/ 400 kilobits upstream speed. Now I have a whopping 800 kbits/sec but I have only observed a top speed of about 640 kbits. No hope of FIOS on the Verizon horizon for me. But hopefully this would give a gateway to the raw Internet and the joy of up to 4 way jamming (all parties must shell out, of course) @ 500 miles of Internet circuit or less.

If anyone tries it, I would be interested to know how it works, from my professional point of view that is.

Dave

Thanks for the input guys! I'm not likely gonna go 'all in' with hardware additions - so I'll likely take a ride with the lesser programs and see if I can deal with the latency - one member will also be using a satellite connection from about 3 hours away -we'll see how that works. I'll keep you updated!