Zoom live performance audio setting

Some more thoughts on thisā€¦

Possibly. To be clear, having local servers only means the service has wider reach. It doesnā€™t solve the issue that such systems require all members of a jam to be geographically fairly local.

Note that some of the existing solutions (Jamulus & Ninjam, for instance) allow anyone to set up their own server, anywhere in the world, and even make that relatively easy to do. So thereā€™s not really anything Zoom could do to improve on this, other than to have more pre-made ā€œpublicā€ servers.

That got me thinking. I do wonder if one-to-one calls is their target for this, rather than for 3 or more band setups. Thereā€™s probably a decent market in online music tuition which would benefit from this.

Itā€™s not new or innovative, because solutions already exist but, being a big name that everyone knows might allow them to grow this market.

Cheers,

Keith

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Yeah that makes sense Keith, picking youā€™re probably right :+1:

During the pandemic my choir switched to Jamulus to remotely sing live together.

There were a lot of technical issues getting setup both in terms of hardware and also room setup. A big one was needing to be hard wired into the home router which for a lot of people meant not being able to be in their room of choice, another was needing to wear head phones so that you were singing to the live broadcast sound rather than yourself. Latency to the host server was the biggest issue of all though. The better the ping rate to the server the more wiggle room there was for other issues to be tweaked to a point that made it workable. Some people had success by switching to service providers who were more dependable, in my case that was not an option, so I had very inconsistent results.

When it worked though it was good fun. Weā€™d use Zoom with audio turned off so that you still had a visual cue of what was going on. Somehow though it never captured that feeling of sound melting when you all sing in the same room, but better than nothing.

There is a huge demand that could be tapped into if all the technical constraints could be overcome and the access made more accessible.

I love the idea of being able to remotely collaborate with other people.

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I suspect these constraints will always exist.

Hardwiring is a way of reducing latency. Wifi always has higher latency than wired connections.

Headphones are needed, primarily, because otherwise you will get feedback. This can be avoided with echo cancellation algorithms, as used on modern video conference software like Meet, Teams, and Zoom, but this distorts audio and adds latency.

Cheers,

Keith

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Thanks @Sound_Bound, thatā€™s really interesting to hear about your experience with this type of set up. Good to know that it was at least fun when it worked, despite all the technical challenges. :sunglasses::+1:
Keith is very right with his explanation of the limitations around whatā€™s technically possible, but if weā€™re able to make it work in some specific scenarios (people who are geographically close, with high speed wired internet and the correct gear setup) then that could open some cool opportunities for those of us who struggle to do this in-person otherwise (i.e. inability to find anyone willing, time constraints, lack of decent band practice venues, etc.).
I would love to hear how this might work for folks in, say, the UK if a few there were willing to give it a crack. @adi_mrok would you be willing to try it out with some others that perhaps live nearby? :thinking::slightly_smiling_face:

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I think Keith did carry out test with folks in the past on Jamolous, unless you mean new Zoom feature?

Online Jamming

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Wow, that was a really cool thread of Keithā€™s you linked, very interesting read :smiley::+1:
Yeah, I was meaning trying the new zoom option. I would, but the nearest person on here to me is probably @RobDickinson whoā€™s in Christchurch I think, ~350-400km away, plus the nearest zoom server is in Sydney. So wondered if you know of some others close by to you that could be interested in trying it out? If theyā€™re already set up to use zoom for the OMā€™s then this should be as easy as turning that option on, or at least thatā€™s how it looks :thinking::wink::sweat_smile:

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Out of interest, have you considered trying Jamulus (or one of the other online jamming tools)?

I fired up Jamulus just now and thereā€™s two servers near me. Iā€™ve not tried them and there donā€™t appears to be any other musicians using them at present, but I may keep an eye on these and see if I can use them.

image

I donā€™t see anything in NZ, but itā€™s pretty easy to run your own server if you want to try it out. If you have decent Internet then you can do this from your own PC.

Of course, Jamulus doesnā€™t include video, if thatā€™s important to you, but you can run it in conjunction with any standard video conferencing app (see document above).

Of course, you need another local musician to try this with.

Cheers,

Keith

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The other one I couldnā€™t remember is Ninjam, which is actually built into Reaper

Cheers,

Keith

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Agreed, this is an interesting read and very much mirrors the learning curve we also went through to get Jamulus up and running.

When first writing Iā€™d not quite appreciated how technical your background is @Majik - kudos in the effort of trying to get this up and running for everyone and documenting it.

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Wow Keith! The amount of work and research you have done on this topic is immense! That document you linked is brilliant! I need to take some time and read through that in detail. I havenā€™t looked into any of the other options, in fact if it wasnā€™t for your posts on the topic, I wouldnā€™t have heard of half of them! Had no idea Ninjam was part of Reaper?! :thinking: :joy:
Would be a super fun thing to get going on a regular basis, I just need to find some local friends that would be interestedā€¦ Need to keep working on that too! :sweat_smile:
Thanks again for all the info youā€™ve provided, Keith! Such a wealth of knowledge you have of this topic :sunglasses: :+1:

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Well, thank you for the kind words, but Iā€™ve worked in Telecommunications Engineering and service design for the last 30+ years. So it was less work than you credit me for.

Latency in networks has been, in some way, an important part of almost every major project Iā€™ve worked on, whether that was connecting office LANs for major companies in London, building Internet and VoIP services, setting up International data centre connectivity with undersea fibres, or 5G ā€œedge computeā€ projects. Itā€™s something I understand pretty well.

And Iā€™ve been interested in Internet jamming for many years. This is partly because a friend of mine, Randy, is a musician turned technologist who is also interested in this (heā€™s actually a far better musician than me, having played guitar in John Mayallā€™s Bluesbreakers back in the day, as well as being credited as being one of the pioneers of the tapping technique). He and I have tried a few approaches including Jamkazam and Jamulus.

Prior to the pandemic (and prior to moving out of Europe), I used to meet up with Randy fairly regularly at Open Source real-time communications conferences and ā€œhackathonsā€ like Kamailio World and Osmocon where such things were part of the agenda.

For instance, another firiend of mine usually runs a session called ā€œDangerous Demosā€ at these conferences which is described as:

Live and interactive ā€˜Dangerous Demosā€™ session which can be done by any of the participants at the event, with subjects containing material that is exciting, educational, entertaining, energetic and potentially explosive, of course, all harmless and related to anything Real Time Communications.

Participants compete against the clock to demonstrate some clever,and often unconventional, use of real-time communication technology.

All highly nerdy, but part of the world Iā€™ve been lucky enough to be part of in for the last few decades.

Cheers,

Keith

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Good to see Zoom moving in this direction, even if its just to enhance audio. Even if live jamming is a pipe dream, I will be curious to know if the ā€œLive Performanceā€ setting improves the audio levels, even if it one person and a guitar (or even an added backing track).

I always hear (and see from Loudness Meters etc) Zoom audio as being supressed, when compared to recording the same set up using OBS. This also seems a little more exaggerated at the OMs when we have multiple meeting participants (opposed to a self recording Zoom test). Something to check in the future.

@adi_mrok I am sure some of the more experienced OMers who have refined their Zoom set ups would be up for a challenge. Thinking @Rossco01 @Notter @liaty @Willsie might be ā€œrelativelyā€ close to you.

Something of interest for our Authā€™ed Teachers as well. I am sure @Richard_close2u Richard would find a low latency 121 meeting really beneficial to teaching ?

All good stuff Jeff, good share !

:sunglasses:

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I was thinking we can try to test it during the soundcheck before next OM, alternatively I am up for scheduling it with anyone from anywhere really. I think Mark is closest to me distance wise?

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Yeah I think so Adi, Iā€™m on the Surrey / Berkshire border, youā€™re Oxford way?. Soundcheck may get a little frantic if weā€™re up at 20 or so performers to get through.

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Thanks @TheMadman_tobyjenner! Yes, great to see Zoom still has an eye on what might enhance the experience for musicians and music teachers.

I suspect that this setting wonā€™t enhance the audio quality unfortunately as I assume whatever they are doing to decrease latency will probably have an adverse effect on quality, but I could be wrong. Iā€™d be thinking the compression Zoom uses to help with transmitting audio will be what causes the level drops you notice, so perhaps that will be further exaggerated with this setting maybe? I guess weā€™ll have to see after some testing! :crossed_fingers::slightly_smiling_face:

We had a quick try of it at work here and picked up on a couple of things. We did a (in theory) point to point call but according to Zoomā€™s stats we were still routed through a Sydney server regardless, so my theory on that could be wrong. It showed our latency at about 45ms which I believe is about normal for a ping from my work computer in Dunedin to a server in Sydney. This didnā€™t change when we enabled the setting and in fact I didnā€™t notice any difference except that our audio was not captured in the Cloud recording whilst that setting was enabled. As my colleague wasnā€™t a musician, we just tried counting in sync to see if that would work (not sure if thatā€™s a reasonable test but we tried it anyway :joy:), however just didnā€™t work unfortunately.

As such I think for us in NZ we be hampered by the tyranny of distance, however for yourselves in the UK/Europe perhaps youā€™ll have more luck given your proximity to servers? I am hoping so, it would be exciting to see something like this integrated seamlessly into a common desktop application without too many technical hurdles. Maybe Zoom will eventually put servers in NZ so we could benefit too :slight_smile:

In addition to the incredible wealth of information Keith has provided, this article also explains the challenges really well. Worth a read if interestedā€¦
How latency makes jamming together in real time nearly impossible

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That article looks interesting Jeff but I unfortunately got a 404 when I tried the link. :face_holding_back_tears:

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Ah !! The embedded address is truncated, can add LE to the end of IMPOSSIB ? :+1:

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Interestingly mine is only updating to 5.13.11 so there must be some sort of staggered rollout. Although I did notice I had update settings set to SLOW rather than FAST so that might have an impact. Iā€™ll give it a try when I get that version.

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If you upgrade to 5.13 and then check for updates again, it should update you to 5.14.

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