Latency is a lot lower than people generally think it is. I'm currently on a terrible satellite connection (not the popular one), and the latency to ping 1.1.1.1 averages 16.184ms right now, during awful weather, and never hits above 25ms. Probably the worst modern case scenario you could imagine for latency's sake, and significantly worse than I had ten years ago. In better weather, it's half that.
If you pull a few tricks, it wouldn't be anywhere near impossible to manage sub-20ms latency on your average connection. Now, over a web browser? I couldn't tell you. I wouldn't bet on it. But definitely possible natively.
And people don't realize how "high" latency is for sound in air. 3ms per meter. Sound is 400,000 times slower per distance. Someone 10 feet away in your living room has the same latency as someone about 750 miles from you via magic network pixies (ignoring routing/switching delays, and the latency of each computer at either end going from bits into the network card, to electrical signal changes out the sound jack.)
In your case, 25ms network latency is equivalent to being 8 meters from another musician. That's basically "the other side of a medium-ish room."
It is funny seeing HNers so incredulous that something like this would work, when apparently lots of musicians have been using stuff like this for over a year, without issue. I wish more HNers realized that being smart isn't about knowing things. It's about knowing what you know, and understanding things like biases.
"Well, my knee-jerk reaction is that latency would be a problem. But I'm not a musician and I have no experience here. And clearly a bunch of people put a fair amount of effort into this. Let me see if my knee-jerk reaction is correct by either waiting to seeing what people who have actually used it say, or doing out the math to compare typical network latency to sound-in-air delay."
That's what a smart person says to themselves.
A smart person does not say, "This couldn't possibly be practical, I'm going to comment immediately to that effect."
> I'm currently on a terrible satellite connection (not the popular one), and the latency to ping 1.1.1.1 averages 16.184ms right now, during awful weather, and never hits above 25ms.
1.1.1.1 is anycasted to many points of presence, one of which might be in the same state as you, so this data point is somewhat irrelevant. I'd be more interested in seeing what king of latency & packet loss you experience to another residential connection far from your location.
Your objection is taking my comment in the least-intelligent light. There's no reason for this service to be P2P; MITMing the connection with a selective forwarding unit would work fine and is the natural conclusion one should reach when analyzing this problem. Cloudflare-in-the-middle would work perfectly.
Like any modern video game, or half of the decent video chat options in the world.
If you pull a few tricks, it wouldn't be anywhere near impossible to manage sub-20ms latency on your average connection. Now, over a web browser? I couldn't tell you. I wouldn't bet on it. But definitely possible natively.