Hi Brandon,
On 19/03/21 14:51, Brandon Hale wrote:
Hey Lorenzo,
As far as the Jamulus stuff, you can totally run a private server on
your main machine. The person connecting would just enter your ip and
port number the server is on and can connect to you directly. You have
to run the server from the shell to customize the options, but you can
use this command to do it:
Thanks for the hint. Will this work also with a dynamic IP and no port
forwarding set-up? I can tinker with that, I guess, but probably most
users wouldn't.
Ciao,
Lorenzo.
Jamulus -s -n -o "*Server-Name*;*Location-name*;*area-code**(see documentation about this)*" -w"*Server name*"
Just fill out the text that is in bold and you can run a private server.
Brandon Hale
On 3/19/21 8:53 AM, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
On 16/03/21 09:14, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
Dear all,
Thank you so much for all the interesting insight and suggestions :-)
Sorry if I can't answer individually for now, but I did real all the
emails, greatly appreciated. This mailing list rocks as usual ;-)
I'll try and test some of the proposed solutions trying to factor in
all of the elements and the fact that I need to try and not to
overcomplicate things for my teacher who - I imagine - is having to
set-up all of the lessons, re-schedule etc. (I'm the student
here...). I'll report back after my first remote lesson ;)
For anyone interested, it is a bit long, but hopefully interesting /
useful for other :)
For our first lesson yesterday we used Zoom for the sake of simplicity
(especially for my teacher and to facilitate their schedule). Audio
quality was decent on both ends), playing together was out of question
(but expected with any similar platform due to latency). My teacher
did point out that 'original audio' feature could improve audio
quality even more... Unfortunately, as said, it doesn't seem to be
available on Linux... Which is weird as you'd think that all of the
funky 'noise reduction' / 'echo cancellation' stuff should be
'additions' and easy to 'turn off', not the reverse... I tried
contacting Zoom but I assume they will never answer.
In the meantime I did some tests (alone, using two laptops, see some
specs at the end) with:
- Discord [1]: sound quality was pretty good, especially after
removing all of the noise reduction, and 'auto' features and lowering
to the minimum 'voice activation' - and it does use Opus. It was not
stereo (which for bass is ok, but would be nice to have e.g. if
playing a backing track etc.). The nice thing was that video is
included. I think that in order to have more fine-grained control over
audio you need to download the client (so not using the web one),
which does exist for Linux. Both parties need to have a registered
account to use this, which might be a bit of a hassle for the other
party who have to a) register and create yet another account b)
install yet another application. Also log-in seems to require captcha
and device verification (I guess due to abuse); but this makes the
sign-up process and first star quite cumbersome. Audio is pulseaudio
of course, which means pulseaudio sink for jack. A 'mobile App' exists.
- Jami [2]: This is a P2P calling system and uses Opus. A bonus is
that it supports Jack directly. It worked ok and included video, but I
did notice a few dropouts and high CPU usage, and one end did crash at
an instance. All in all, it didn't seem the quality was much higher
than Discord. Also mono-only. But I think that's expected as this is
probably and evolution of SIP 'softphone0' clients (e.g. like Egika?).
Account creation is easy as you really just enter a name and username
(no central email registration etc. needed). It does require both
parties having an installed client. Again this last point might prove
a bit of an additional hassle. A 'mobile App' exists.
- Cleanfeed [3]: audio-only, web-only, freemium. Primarily aimed at
online broadcasting / podcasting / news. Considering that this works
out of the browser (Chrom* ones (including -ium) only officially
supported but they try to make it work also on Firefox), I was quite
impressed by the audio quality of the 'Music' setting available with
the free account (they offer even higher bitrates with the paid ones.
As a bonus 'music' is in stereo. I contacted support with a couple of
questions and they were very friendly and helpful and seem also quite
knowledgeable about Linux. The interesting feature here is that you
just provide a link to the other party who join through a browser.
This being browser-based also means you need pulseaudio and the sink
if using jack (like in all my tests). No video means setting up some
other (muted) video service for that. The browser-only link thing
could make this relatively easy to propose by just sending the link to
my teacher once we start the zoom call and having them use it for
audio and mute their zoom, we shall see. They are also quite
straightforward in saying that this is not primarily intended for
online 'jamming'.
- Jamulus [4]: audio-only, realtime online jamming-oriented with
public 'servers', jack-native. This was actually real fun to test and
play with. I tried some close-by servers and jammed a bit in the
central one. With 128 frames set in JACK and using Jamulus' own direct
monitoring latency was definitely acceptable and the audio quality
pretty good. Audio-quality and music-friendliness wise this is
probably the nicest to use. Only thing for a teaching setting is the
public-only servers (the documentation mentions 'private' ones, but I
haven't looked into if this is possible without actually 'hosting' a
server), there is a workaround via soloing or muting others, but I
don't think most teachers (nor students) would feel comfortable with
anyone possibly coming in and listening to the lesson. Also video
should be provided via some other tool and, of course, all parties
need to have the software installed.
That said this software is really well made and fun to use.
(aside note there were a couple of 'troll' events in one of the public
servers, and although they say don't feed the trolls 'audio trolling'
can hurt your ears... Not sure how this could be solved, maybe some
'reputation' system like on Stack overflow or similar.. but that does
have its flaws.. and it's another topic :-)
In all tests my set-up was the following:
Hardware:
- Bass -> cheap Bass DI [balanced out] -> ZOOM H5 in | [H5 also
providing microphone input via the included X/Y mics (so in 4-track mode]
In all cases the Laptop I hooked the ZOOM H5 to was connected via
network cable to the router. I'm also using (since about 1 week) an
FTTH connection. With the exception of Jamulus, I also tried
connecting the other test laptop via thetering 4G just to test what
the other user would potentially hear, and the results were always
pretty good (I did not however test the reverse).
Software:
- Jack
- Zoom H5 shows 4 inputs in jack: the L/R mics and the inputs 1 and 2
- Where Jack was natively supported mic1+2 and input 3 were sent to
the application
- Where Jack was not supported I added the pulseaudio sink (I always
start that manually via a script I have since ages), with similar
routing.
- All of the software (with the exception of Cleanfeed which is
web-based), I was able to find packaged for Manjaro either in the
official repositories or in AUR.
Things I'd like to try but din't have the chance to, yet:
- SonoBus [5]
- SoundJack [6]
- JackTrip [7]
[1]: https://discord.com/
[2]: https://jami.net/
[3]: https://cleanfeed.net/
[4]: https://jamulus.io/
[5]: https://sonobus.net/
[6]: https://www.soundjack.eu/
[7]: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/soundwire/software/jacktrip/
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