Ooh something I have direct personal experience in. I currently use Zoom once a week for a music lesson. The latency is poor but my friend is not super great with computers so it's a reasonable compromise.
Now _playing_ together is much more challenging, and not something especially viable for students (which is why it's a bit weird targeting this at Zoom): you definitely need a proper audio interface, most likely with ~5ms of latency. You then also absolutely have to be on a wired network connection, which on most modern laptops probably requires another adapter, as wireless introduces too much latency. Overall you need < 25ms of latency in order to be able to play "live" together. This is doable but you need the right tools.
I'm a folk musician who plays in pubs and you can even see the effects of latency in a real-life setting like that - if the room is too large then people on the other side start to drop out of time. What I do in this situation is follow their hands rather than what I can hear. Unfortunately this too doesn't work online due to video latency being even worse. Metronomes don't really work for our music because it doesn't follow a standard BPM, it can and should vary.
We did manage a few sessions using JamKazam (https://jamkazam.com/) which works well enough with the tweaks listed above. It's largely restricted to people who know what they're doing, sadly.
Now _playing_ together is much more challenging, and not something especially viable for students (which is why it's a bit weird targeting this at Zoom): you definitely need a proper audio interface, most likely with ~5ms of latency. You then also absolutely have to be on a wired network connection, which on most modern laptops probably requires another adapter, as wireless introduces too much latency. Overall you need < 25ms of latency in order to be able to play "live" together. This is doable but you need the right tools.
I'm a folk musician who plays in pubs and you can even see the effects of latency in a real-life setting like that - if the room is too large then people on the other side start to drop out of time. What I do in this situation is follow their hands rather than what I can hear. Unfortunately this too doesn't work online due to video latency being even worse. Metronomes don't really work for our music because it doesn't follow a standard BPM, it can and should vary.
We did manage a few sessions using JamKazam (https://jamkazam.com/) which works well enough with the tweaks listed above. It's largely restricted to people who know what they're doing, sadly.