I know of JamKazam and Bandlab. I’m betting there are others.
From the JamKazam description page:
Play music from home with your friends and bandmates without packing and transporting gear, and without needing a rehearsal space.
BandLab says:
Make Music Anywhere
Our award-winning music creation features empower you with everything you need for your next big hit. Create, collaborate and sync across platforms, all with unlimited cloud storage.
Has anyone done this sort of thing? (Of course you have) How did it work out for you? Has anyone tried more than one and could compare them?
Entirely aside from app latency (e.g. server & network response time) I would expect speed-of-light delay to be significant. A delay of 16 microseconds (which I suspect is going to be significant) happens (at lightspeed) at just under 5 km (call it 3 miles). That’s going to make playing together a challenge even for bandmates who live near each other.
If you’re used to home studio work, it’ll be lacking capabilities/features.
Not one of the best-written Web sites/applications I’ve ever used–user interface is a challenge.
(example: upload a band photo as your profile pic, the aspect ratio it forces you to use when you crop it is not the aspect ratio that is displayed once it’s saved)
The “oh my gosh” style of the help screens makes it seem amateurish
(example: You can also pick the plethora of cool vocal effects to use in order to make sure vocals stand out more within your video performance!)
Interestingly, I was just watching a livestream of an interview with moe. today where they mentioned they’ve tried this but found the latency to be totally unacceptable. I don’t think speed-of-light will be a significant factor until you get up near a few milliseconds or so (several hundred miles). Two of the moe. members apparently live more than 1000 miles apart so that could be a problem for them. But at any distance, the codec latency is going to be a killer. There are low-latency codecs, but every codec is going to introduce some latency and live music jamming is probably the worst possible application for a conduit with latency.
120 beats/minute = 2 beats/second
1 sec = 1000 ms
1 beat = 500 ms
32nd note = 500/32 = 16 ms (15.625 ms)
Now 32nd notes at 120 is pretty darned fast, but my guess is that one’s drummer could hear the difference if you aren’t hitting the downbeat within less than 16 ms. Your drummer may vary.
Just tried JamKazam. Total waste of time. You must install their app on your computer to use it (BandLab works from the Web page). Setup requires many steps (BandLab was much easier). The interface is bothersome, doesn’t show waveforms for recorded tracks, has very little in the way of editing capability (BandLab looks like a much-simplified DAW interface–allows clipping tracks, moving clips from track to track, etc.).
I’m connected to the DC jazz scene, and this is quite a hot topic: everyone is dying for a way to play together live online.
Just today I saw a long Facebook thread about JamKazam: apparently it’s *possible *to get the latency to an acceptable minimum, but it takes a lot of time/tweaking, pro equipment, and more tech skills than possessed by the average musician.
I haven’t heard anything about BandLab being promising.
I’m normally in a Thursday night jazz workshop, and the instructor has switched to online vocal coaching sessions: we send him a chart of what we want to work on, he records the accompaniment and sends it to us, and we play it back on our end while singing along. It’s not ideal, but seems to be working well enough. Being hardwired is better than using wifi, and a few of us are experimenting with USB microphones.