In the past 4 months, I got to know over 30 people by jamming with them on Jamulus. When you click on the "Connect" button Jamulus will list the public servers, sorted by latency. It will also list the name of people in each server. This works pretty well if there are Jamulus users in your area.
8 months ago, before Jamulus became more popular in my area, we used Clubhouse to connect with more musicians. We started a Clubhouse room and streamed the sound from Jamulus to that room. We put the server IP address in the room title and in the bio so listeners can connect to our server and jam with us. This brought our group from 3 people to about 20 people.
This reminds me of what happened on the first few weeks of trying out Jamulus. Every musician tries to match the tempo of other musicians. This results in the song gradually slowing down as you described. The next thing we realize is that we are playing songs at 50% speed.
So in the end we designated some instruments to drive the song. Usually its the drums. The person who drives the song must not wait for other instruments and keep their own tempo, and everyone else try to time their instruments to be in-sync with the drums. It works quite well for us.
I found that most of the latency in networked audio applications, when jamming within 800 km within domestic internet, mostly comes from (a) a large network buffer (to prevent sound stutter when the network isn’t reliable, e.g. due to wi-fi interference) and (b) extra audio processing on top (echo cancellation, noise suppression), and not the limitation of light speed.
Most new people who try out Jamulus and join our servers would complain about the latency (especially professional musicians), to which I give the same advice: 1) Use a fiber-optic internet service. 2) Use a LAN cable. 3) Use wired headphone (no bluetooth/wireless headphone/AirPods). 4) Use an audio interface with ASIO device or use a Mac. Finally, and most important: 5) Just play 100 songs on Jamulus, and you’ll eventually get used to it.
Most friends are jamming with latency of around 20ms. I have found that for vocals and drums, maximum latency tolerance is around 30ms. For me I play the keyboard and most of the time I’m jamming over a 4G mobile network, I have increased my latency tolerance to about 100ms now.
odd choice indeed, I wasn’t thinking clearly when I experimented and wrote the article.
putting a black and transparent image atop the video sounds like a much better idea — i will try it and see if it works. thanks for the suggestion!