Zoom live performance audio setting

Hey folks,
Just updated Zoom to version 5.14 and see theyā€™ve added a new audio setting called ā€œLive Performance Audioā€.
It mentions the setting is ā€œrecommended for multiple instruments or voices in different locationsā€ and it ā€œreduces audio lag during live performances when musicians are on separate Zoom clientsā€.

Currently showing as BETA and couldnā€™t find any release notes about it so I guess itā€™s still a work in progress but could be interesting to test. Good to see it is on Zoomā€™s radar at least :wink::slightly_smiling_face:

P.S. at my meeting last week with our Zoom account manager/tech support, I raised the issue about having to always manually enable Original Sound when joining the meeting. They took that on board and said the would raise it with their technical team to look at :slight_smile:

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It will be intriguing to see if they actually get anywhere close to making this work for jamming or performance between different people.

A lot of specialist systems have been created (Jamkazam, Jamendo, etc.) which sometimes struggle to support this. Typically, they include capabilities to discover or coordinate users who are local to support low-latency connections.

Cheers,

Keith

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Yeah, I thought the same. Iā€™m fairly sure zoom works point to point on 2 person calls but has to bridge it through their servers for 3 or more attendees. So for me Iā€™m thinking maybe a 1 to 1 call with someone local when weā€™re both on high speed connections might work but otherwise Iā€™ll be routing through an offshore server, probably in Sydney, so doubt thatā€™ll workā€¦ :thinking::sweat_smile:

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I guess the big difference is that Zoomā€™s budget will be a lot bigger especially post covid boom comparing to other software providers you have mentioned in your post, and that makes a huge difference in what can and cannot be done :wink:

Thanks for letting us know Jeff seems VERY interesting to say the least!

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Actually, it probably doesnā€™t. The primary problem is an Internet routing/topology one, combined with the laws of Physics.

Zoom is, primarily, a software house, and thereā€™s very little they can do with software to fix latency issues, that hasnā€™t already been done by other software vendors and smart Open-source applications (which are often more technically advanced than commercial apps).

What they might be able to do is to make it a bit more polished and user-friendly to access.

Most likely they will mainly use the fact that they are a well-known brand with a big user base to get people using it.

Cheers,

Keith

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You did mention once Keith that there is an issue with playing between people who are far away from each other as speed of light cannot be exceeded and there will be always a limitation on that end and how much latency one.gets. However if they would use (and I am just making it up as I write so excuse my ignorance!) Some sort of algorithm which would deal with delayed sync perhaps that could work? Perhaps they figured out a smart way of how to do it efficiently?

They probably have more servers available worldwide comparing to smaller outfits which potentially would be helpful? Please remember I am not IT savy, I am just a keen learner :laughing:

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Yes, thatā€™s already been done. There are apps which, basically, work on the basis that you worry about synchronising at a bar level rather than trying to collaborate in true real time.

I think Jammr is one such application.

As I suggested, pretty much every approach has already been tried already. I highly doubt Zoom can do anything which hasnā€™t already been done.

If they do something, and make a success of it, then great. But I would bet dollar to donuts that, if they do, itā€™s because they are a big brand, not because they have come up with something new.

Rather like Appleā€¦

Cheers,

Keith

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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.

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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 @Willsie01 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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