Anyone Tried JamKazam?

[NighthawkChris]

Recently, my band was looking into JamKazam as a way to remotely practice.  I personally haven't left my house to socialize since mid March, but the other 3 are OK with rehearsing in-person, so in order for me to participate, I need something like this.  

Back a few months ago around April-May, we tried Jamulus (open-source software) to do this which requires a computer of some sort (not sure on all supported OS - I use Windows unfortunately, haha) and an interface with minimum sample rate of 48kHz.  It is also preferred to have a wired connection to the internet as well to reduce latency as much as possible from what the documentation says.  To me, this is a no-brainer to use a hard-wired connection.  But back then at least, it was pretty bad experience when we tested it.  Extreme latency, and I have a super-fast internet connection (~700Mbps down and 24Mbps up).  We tried on a public server, and we tried making our own server on one of my quad-core PCs where both yielded poor results.  I mean, you really notice it when you have ~25ms or more latency.  We were all averaging around say 50ms which is god awful...  

So we gave up on that, but very recently we tried JamKazam which yielded better results where we could actually jam together in real-time with less than 15ms latency to be conservative here.  But you can deal with this honestly.  We aren't some speed/black metal group here, so when you are not in the mega hundreds of bpm for each song, 15ms is... OK.  It was simple to set up.  I made an account, downloaded the Windows application to install it, logged in, then set up my interface briefly.  I was ready to start a session where we could all join and do our thing.  The software has some features that are broken, but generally, the main feature of combining the audio via IP, the results were encouraging.  

I have found that having a hard-wired Ethernet connection to your PC using a minimum of a CAT6 cable (maybe no less than CAT5E) helps a ton, and it also pays to have a good interface that hopefully if using Windows connects to the PC via USB 3.x.  I even tried with a USB 2.0 audio interface and it was usable, but again I believe that you want as fast a connection to your PC for this interface as possible because it plays into latency reduction where EVERY millisecond counts.  And if you are using economy internet package by your ISP, probably want to upgrade that too.  I have my own modem and router, so my equipment that my ISP uses to deliver internet is top-notch.  My modem supports DOCSIS 3.1 and my router's Ethernet ports are gigabit speed - which most are anyhow today as the 10/100 only Ethernet ports are somewhat ancient today, haha!  

Overall, if anyone was interested in something like this, I wanted to share my experience thus far with these remote solutions to band practices and such.  I am not trying to sell anyone one or the other because both are free to try - haven't paid a dime yet with JamKazam, and Jamulus is open-source which it totally free.  I'm simply looking for the best solution for remote band software.  If anyone has tried other things like these, let me know too because I am very interested in the topic.  But what I could find, these are the only 2 that I uprooted.  Maybe I'm just lazy and didn't look hard enough...  This takes some setup and investment in internet/PC related stuff no doubt.  But once it works, it's really not too bad.  I can only hope it gets better in the future.  

[NighthawkChris]

1 hour ago, ghost_of_fl said:

Sounds cool, I want to try it. Forum jam?

Technical note regarding Cat6 cables:

They are not all created the same.  I have a device which certifies cables as Cat6.  The high quality cables we use check out as Cat6.  But if I take one of the cables that came with our Shoretel phones and test that, it fails - despite being labeled as Cat6.  I also confirmed this by doing file copies across our network using a LAN speed test.  The Shortel Cat6 cables cause significant lag where the high quality cables perform as expected. 

I hear ya...  My simplistic test FWIW is to simply connect my router to my PC with an Ethernet cable and see if I get 1Gbps when I look at the network connection stats in Windoze.  Reason why I have relied on this simple test is I had a "Cat 6" cable that wouldn't show 1Gbps doing what I explained.  It did get to 100Mbps though, but come on, WiFi 5 (i.e. 802.11ac) does better than that today...  Well, maybe.  From what I learned about this WiFi 5 sort of round-robins all clients - i.e. handles one device at a time when moving data around.  WiFi 6 (802.11ax) is supposed to improve upon this as well as the next WiFi 6E.  If you have a lot of WiFi devices (with WiFi 5 or earlier spec), you will increase latency of the WLAN I imagine.  I digress, I agree on the cable thing though - not all made equal.  I don't cheapy out on this as I try to buy a quality cable - i.e. spend a bit more.  I mean, you get what you pay for perhaps???  Especially since I run a 50' cable, I don't want it to fail me in the sense that it doesn't give the throughput I expect a Cat 6 cable to deliver.  Oh, I also do internet speed tests and compare the results to my ISP internet package.  I have Comcast, so as I said, 600 down and 20 up, and running a test with my new modem gives me results such as 700 down and 24 up pretty consistently...  Can't complain there really.  I rarely have issues getting pages to load in my devices' web browsers or have my streaming services to crap out on the TV/streaming devices.  I feel I don't need the Gig package just yet based on our family's demands. 

But we could do a forum jam - I'd have fun doing that, haha!  You can set up to have "friends" with your account so you can ping them to set up a session.  IDK, DL the software and try it out in a solo session to test your gear to see latency, etc.  My interface is a Zoom L-12 with USB 2.0 capabilities.  It's OK...  My one buddy uses his Mac Book (with a Cat 7 cable) and gets better latency results.  Not too sure on his interface he uses though.  He has a few choices to pick from.  Just to forewarn, the create band feature is VERY buggy.  I recommend just working with the jam session feature for the most part before you start beating it up testing everything.  And when I say buggy, I made a band profile and now I can't edit anything I initially entered...  Can't do it in the app or on the web page.  And you can't start sessions I believe without installing the app based on the messages the web page gives when I try using the web interface to do so.  You may find out more when you try it out.  Meanwhile, excited to see something like this happen today.  Lemme know what you come up with if you decide to give it a shot. 

EDIT: Oh yeah, video feature sucked.  Once we tried it, the audio SEVERELY suffered...  IDK how you get aroud this because video conferences take up a good amount of bandwidth too as well as using this and trying to have low-latency audio routing.  Maybe I do need the Gig package haha! 

Edited October 9, 2020 by NighthawkChris