

Realtempo – online rehearsal rooms to make music together in real time - 720kb
http://realtempo.com

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720kb
Hi all, just noticed your comments, sorry for the delay, we are still working
here on the platform.

The one you see is simply a Beta experimental platform and we would like real
musicians / singers to try it and give feedbacks, there is a contact form
please use it if you would help.

Latency is a big problem in many countries/cities, we are 100% conscious that
this will not work for all people unfortunately.

The aim is to use the best of web technologies for realtime communication
(webRTC) and enable new ways to collaborate in music, so we thought to create
a simple "rehearsal room" where people can plug themselves, but it's not
really a definitive version.

We all are mostly musicians making things for musicians so feel free to
contact us by the contact form.

We are listening all of you and we will try to adapt all your needs and
suggestions to the platform!

Thank you a lot.

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robhack
That's the kind of stuff I might be interested in, but the lack of any video
(or even screenshot) showing me what the thing is like before I have to sign
up is a bit off-putting imo.

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krapht
I feel the same way. How is this better than a video conference?

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inli3u
Too bad they don't explain how it works. True real time jamming is impossible,
but you can jam in pseudo real time by delaying everyone's audio by an entire
measure. It's been done before by Justin Frankel:
[http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/](http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/). Actually I've
always had dreams of recreating it as a web app... would be cool if that's
what they did here.

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RossDM
I thought this sort of thing was pretty much impossible due to latency issues.

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bemmu
One way to make a site like this work would be if instead of hitting notes /
recording in real time, you would interact with a tracker. Just like playing
around with an 808, people would be able to click to set drum hits or notes.
It would get played next time the track loops around (after a few seconds), by
which time hopefully everyone would be synchronized.

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robhack
Or the realtime could just be an illusion, like in plink
[http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink/](http://labs.dinahmoe.com/plink/) (pretty fun
little tool, even though you are quite limited because of the forced
pentatonic scale and tempo)

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KyleBrandt
I think a degree of latency can be conquered, but it is going to be difficult.
Musicians need to maintain synchronized _internal_ clocks. This is because you
can't really be in sync if you are reacting to sound.

For example it is going to take about 80 milliseconds for sound to cross an
orchestral stage (Wolfram:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+to+trave...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+to+travel+100+feet)).
That is roughly east coast to west coast round trip latency:
([http://serverfault.com/questions/137348/how-much-network-
lat...](http://serverfault.com/questions/137348/how-much-network-latency-is-
typical-for-east-west-coast-usa/137364#137364)). Then you add reaction time to
that. In this situation musicians already have to use visual cues combined
with anticipation to synchronize. There is also usually a conductor (making
things better or worse :-) ).

So with strict time (no rubato), strong internal clocks of each musician and
maybe some compensation I think this _is_ possible - latency just makes it
_harder_ because it is harder to correct your internal clock and it has to be
strong.

But you also have other issues such as sound balance as well as video and
sound quality. I suggest maybe reaching out to the distance learning
department at CIM. They have a distance learning program and were doing music
over teleconferencing ~ ten years ago over Internet2 - someone there can
probably point to some resources on tackling these issues.

The other thing is will people _want_ to use this. My guess is not usually,
but for friends at a distance, or lessons with teachers (advanced teachers, or
places without music teachers) it could be popular.

My hypothesis is the latency will make it difficult for musicians, especially
without significant practice over this medium. So _initial_ impressions will
be bad. If that is the case it will be important to set accurate expectations.

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laurentoget
does any musician believe this could even be possible? considering how hard it
seems to be to establish consistently reliable audio connections for simple
conversations, i have a hard time imagining how you could make music, which
requires incredibly low latency.

