One way delay between San Francisco and New York city is 37ms across the public internet today.
This is the same one way delay as sound in air across 12 meters, which would be on the large size for an orchestra pit.
It does get larger as you go further, but live performance with people on the other side of a large continent is completely realistic and has been done. :)
Sure, expecting to go between NYC and someone in china behind the GFW is probably asking too much for a seamless experience. But many people mostly want to work with people in the same country as them ... and for that, with sufficient technology, latency need not be an issue.
> live performance with people on the other side of a large continent is completely realistic and has been done. :)
In case you're not aware, I'm the original author of JACK, around which JackTrip is built, which is the most likely and reliable tool for such a collaboration. I certainly know people who've done this, and I regret that I didn't realize back in February how useful it would have been to make something like JackTrip into a much easier-to-use tool for computer-naive folks.
37ms cross-country in the USA is optimistic, but certainly possible. US->Europe is not so great.
In case you're not aware, I'm one of the authors of Opus. :P
When the pandemic hit I thought about putting out some pointers to easier to use low latency streaming resources... but... that would require overcoming pandemic lockdown funk. And honestly it's still kind of a technical rats nest to get everything working. It's not exactly musician friendly to need instructions like "next you need to make sure your nic doesn't enable interrupt mitigation when there are more than 100 packets per second...". :)
Another example of HN being amazing. In the interest of playing too, I did some work on reducing audio latency in Android, but that all predated AAudio/Oboe, which takes that quite a bit further and makes at least the Pixel devices a plausible platform for low-latency audio collaboration apps as suggested in this thread. I for one would love to see that happen - I miss singing hymns on Sunday mornings.
Yeah, I'm really sad that I didn't get some serious effort together on this back at the start of the year. There's no lockdown funk here, just too busy working on Ardour.
One of the 2 netjack implementations uses Opus - great stuff.
Absolutely right that the good stuff (i.e. not zoom) requires way too much setup, and even then (as you note) you're not guaranteed reliable function because you don't control all the hops. Soundjack gets the user-side fairly good, but it's still not quite what I think would have really taken off during the pandemic - probably needs a mobile app for that.
And I love AOO, I use it as the basis for SonoBus.... I’ve been meaning to contact you about it, and work on merging your latest into my fork (which has diverged a bit over the last few months).
Latency in this case is cumulative. 1-5ms for DAW encoding of your analog signal, encoding it in whatever codec is used for transmission 1-?ms. Actual transmission 10-1000ms. Decoding the signal into audio channels for playback 1-5ms. Don’t forget this is duplex. You are transmitting as you are also receiving. In an ideal world we could get very close to zero-latency (enough where an orchestra could by in time step with each other).
It sounds do-able. It sounds like we should already be there. Looking around though you’ll see we aren’t because of technical issues described that are systemic of the infrastructure used.
This is the same one way delay as sound in air across 12 meters, which would be on the large size for an orchestra pit.
It does get larger as you go further, but live performance with people on the other side of a large continent is completely realistic and has been done. :)
Sure, expecting to go between NYC and someone in china behind the GFW is probably asking too much for a seamless experience. But many people mostly want to work with people in the same country as them ... and for that, with sufficient technology, latency need not be an issue.