eJamming AUDiiO: Play Live with Other Musicians Over the Net
There’s nothing quite like getting a group of people together in a dingy garage and playing live music together. But eJamming AUDiiO comes close.
The eJamming software is like Skype for musicians. It allows you to connect with fellow rockers over the Internet and jam — even if your drummer lives a few states away. And because you can do this all through a set of headphones, you won’t have to worry about the police knocking on your door after your neighbors file a noise complaint.
Developer eJamming was faced with the obstacle of having to transmit high quality audio while avoiding latency transmission delays. While AUDiiO has successfully achieved this, there are a few requirements: you need a good Internet connection and the distance between your fellow musicians shouldn’t be more than a few hundred miles (you can still use it at a further distance, but there will be a noticeable latency).
With AUDiiO you can play in sync and even record your live compositions with its basic sound editing software. The software can interface with your current audio input setup so there should be no additional hardware required to get it up and running. As musicians know, subtle facial expressions are necessary for a successful performance, so the eJamming team is working on video support.
eJamming AUDiiO is beta software and can be downloaded after signing up for an eJamming account (free while in beta). You can also check out a video demo of AUDiiO.
Alan from eJamming here. Thanks for the blogpost. I’d like to correct a few facts in I can:
eJamming is completely FREE to use using the public Beta. The cost of a monthly subscription when we leave Beta has not been set yet.
And musicians connecting over eJamming are playing and recording with other musicians over much longer distances – across countries or even from continent to continent – connecting from Japan to San Francisco to Denmark in a session (although the sync delay was high).
It can take some practice to adapt to the delays in these long distance jams [60-120mS (or milliseconds)] but because eJamming is synchronizing everyone’s audio stream, you just play ahead of the beat by the same amount and place your notes in sync with your jam partners.
Also eJamming’s Overdub mode allows the musician recording a new track to experience near-zero latency while every one else in the session hears the new tracks synced to the previously recorded tracks.
Come check it out. And thanks for blogging about us.
Thanks for the comment Alan, I fixed the article up a bit.
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I have been using eJamming for a while now. I’m in Montreal and my jamming friend is in Toronto. We only jam in “two person sessions” so my comment will be based on those sessions.
The default settings in “Jam” mode delay by a beat. After tweaking with the program (Taking the sync out of “Auto” and going to “Manual”) and jamming in “distance mode” we have got it down to basically no delay at all. Really….not noticeable.
So if your going to use eJamming be prepared to tweak the settings and then I think you will be impressed.
Make sure you have a microphone hooked up at each end so you can communicate while jamming then the adjusting/tweaking will be easier.
Once you do get it sync’d, the last problem the developers have is that it will cut out every now and then for a beat or two. They are aware of this problem and are working on it.
Overall both of us are very impressed and will probably subscribe when it comes out of Beta.
I just stumbled upon ejamming tonight after just discussing with some fellow musicians in Texas (I’m currently in Pennsylvania) how we could go about performing live shows via the internet. Well, I just finished jamming on my Moog synthesizer with a guy on guitar and drum machine in London and I am sold! I think this is not only the perfect solution for the problem of me performing or jamming with my friends in Texas remotely, but I think this could revolutionize the entire way music is performed! There was no perceptible latency and the sound quality was more than acceptable, it was pretty darn good. I can’t promote this service enough to musicians who are looking to jam with fellow long distance friends or find inspiration from any other musician from the next state or the next hemisphere! I am just blown away that this even exists. Every musician should be using this.