[linux-audio-user] jaming over the internet?

[Juhan Leemet]

GuyCLO~ wrote:
>On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:58:22 -0230, Juhan Leemet wrote / a écrit:
>> Now add in the long
>> echo delay, and I suspect that's too much to handle: 3 time bases: what you
>> want to play, what you are playing (feel?), and what you hear. Comments?
>
>I have read your interesting text, and I think the points you bring are 
>correct.
>But I think that the idea should not be dismissed just for the reason that 
>it's not suitable for some people/sorts of music. Some people may want to 
>play new-age in the same basement/city over IP :)
>In some cases, this app will be very valuable. Is it really hard to use 
>aconnect, as Gustavo suggested?

Sorry. It is not my intention to dismiss the idea, but try to understand and 
discuss the limits/boundaries. After all, we are constrained by physical 
laws. If the (effective) transmission time from L.A. to NewYork is greater 
than some perceptual delay (I don't know enough, to say what that is), then 
the technique is not going to work (between L.A. and NewYork, but maybe it 
will work between L.A. and Santa Monica?), at least for streaming 
high-bandwidth audio. Popular press often gets this stuff wrong, since they 
prefer sensationalism. No point attacking a problem that can't be solved. In 
the same city, I guess it could be feasible, maybe, but we'll have to try it.

I recall the hoopla about video conferencing, and my computer consulting 
client (a telco) basically gave up (at least for their own development 
projects) after a couple of years of trying. Calculations all seemed good. 
Marketing guys were enthusiastically (over) selling, as usual. In practice,  
just didn't work well enough. This client was a telco, so they had available 
all the bandwidth they wanted! Delays, jitter, quality, "artifacts" (of 
compression?), and just plain unreliability made it horrible. This was for 2 
and 3 way tele-conferencing. I think one-way video streaming (such as some 
instructional videos) does (sort of) work, and mostly because you can add as 
much delay as you want to allow filtering, buffers to catch up, etc.. We are 
all being "trained" to accept lower quality video, and jerkier motion, etc. 

Hopefully we won't degrade our music into those lame MIDI demos of "blues" or 
"jazz". Reminds me of some classical music professors I have heard trying to 
form a jazz band: technically great, mathematically precise, theoreticaly 
"faultless", but no soul, and therefore lame and uninteresting. Not trying to 
slag classical music professors. I imagine there are some here. "In theory 
there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." As 
we compress and process, we remove some soul and feel. A lot of contemporary 
music seems "over-processed", and therefore sounds all much the same. Maybe 
the fault is mine, and I'm being far too demanding (discriminating?).

Internet jamming is easier with MIDI traffic. I had not thought in those 
terms, probably because I'm currently (re)learning some guitar, which does 
not translate into MIDI very well (expensive rigs, tracking is a problem). My 
conception was that jamming = (two-way) "real-time audio streaming" (hard!).

Steve mentioned that some universities have special high-bandwidth, 
low-latency interconnections set up. They must be quite special, and I'm not 
sure how easily those capabiliites will be available to the rest of us.

I am finding this information interesting. Food for thought (and experiment). 
I should get back to wrestling with my M-Audio Audiophile 2496, and getting 
it to work with various applications. Too many distractions.

-- 
Juhan Leemet
Logicognosis, Inc.