The e-Jam Room?

[stealyerface]

Not sure where this should go, but the Tech portion of this seemed to be the right idea.

For a while now, I have been wondering about the possibility of the technological possibility of an "e-Jam Room", which would allow someone to host a room, and invite buddies in to play together via the computer.

This would certainly not be as intimate as playing in the same room, and would make it harder to use the cues and eye contact for progressions etc... but it seems that there ought to be a way to make it work.

Because music is so timing based, is the biggest obstacle the latency, lag, computer speed/processing?

If you can have 100,000 people playing World of Warcraft all at the same time, in real time, why can't you have four guitarists jamming together from different parts of the country/world, and via the interfaces that are available, make a go of it online?

Thoughts?

[LocustPlague]

Transmitting the amount of data necessary for the music would be the biggest hurdle. Bandwidth consumed by games like World of Warcraft is incredibly minimal compared to the bandwidth consumed by music...especially if you want the music to be of decent quality. In order to get it transmitted anything close to real-time, you would need to send it raw (which is essentially WAV format) which is absurdly large compared to things like mp3 (which would have to be encoded, transferred and decoded). WAV format uses 44100 samples per second at 16 bits per sample...that works out to 705600 b/s or 705k (that's nearly 1Mbit of upload speed). The average United States broadband upload is about 1.5Mbit (with many people being far below that) and that's not really a sustained upload rate in most cases...it's a peak number.

[stealyerface]

It seemed to me that was probably the biggest issue, but with my lack of knowledge on the bandwith/files etc... it now looks like a huge hurdle.

Last year, I was invited to my first "Headphone Jam" whereby we had a drummer, bass, keys and two guitars, but we were somewhat shackled by the host's wife being home, and tired of trying to sleep through the drum kit at 2am. So, we switched to the electric drums, and ran all the instruments through a mixer, and we all played through headphones. I loved the fact that when you took off the phones, all you heard was the "unplugged" twang of the guitar strings and the pat-pat on the drums pads, but when the headphones went back on, it was a full-on raucous jam session. Wife was happy and everyone played til the sun came up.

After enjoying that as much as I did, and the fact that guys all live in Canada a few hours away, I wondered about replicating that whole session, but with everyone plugged into their interfaces at different locales....

Seemed like a cool idea, but with the explanation of the issues involved, looks like a trip to Canada is a more feasible idea..

syf

[Daddydex]

There is a program called Ninjam (i think) that works with Reaper that can do this. I have done some online jamming.

Dan