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Jacktrip virtual studio
Unfortunately it’s a hard time for musicians all over the world. Jamming together isn’t easy anymore due to Covid-19. While it might still be ok for small bands, it is especially challenging for large orchestras and choirs. While video conferencing solutions work well for remote workers, they usually don’t perform well for musicians. The problem is latency – if there’s a delay in the transmission that’s too long, you won’t be able to play/sing synchronously. Luckily, there’s a solution for this: Jacktrip virtual studio. You can read a lot about this on their web site and even order fully assembled devices from them, but if you already own a Pi, you can also assemble your own device. Let’s have a look at this solution
Play music with others over the Internet
Sing with your chorus, or jam with your band without leaving home. Virtual Studio is a tool for musicians that enables them to produce music together over common Internet connections. It delivers high quality sound with minimal time delay, so that musicians can keep the beat and stay in harmony. It can make it sound like you are in the same room next to each other, even when you are actually hundreds of miles apart.
Easy to use web application
The Virtual Studio web application offers an easy-to-use interface for assembling your group, and connecting everyone together using a JackTrip audio hub server. It can also be used to manage our Virtual Studio devices, or any custom built devices that use our Raspberry Pi disk images.
High quality audio
Most other solutions compress your audio using lossy codecs, forcing you to sacrifice fidelity and harmonics for bandwidth. This sound is often described as garbled, muddied or robotic. Virtual Studio defaults to using uncompressed, CD quality audio (48khz, lossless). If your Internet connection can handle it, you can even use HD quality audio (96khz) for the best possible sound. It also supports lossy (low bandwidth) audio, if your Internet connection happens to be more constrained.
Supports large groups
The Virtual Studio service was originally developed for a chorus of over 200 members, and is currently being used by groups of over 80. While proper scalability testing is ongoing, our initial tests indicate that it can support hundreds of musicians performing together. When it comes to scale, we haven’t found anything that even comes close.
Fully-managed cloud audio servers
Virtual Studio is best if you live within one of our supported geographical regions. The web application uses cloud computing to manage audio servers for you. While our initial footprint for the beta is intentionally small, we plan to rapidly expand out to all geographical regions that are supported by all the major cloud computing providers.
Everyone else is able to use the Virtual Studio web application with externally-managed JackTrip audio hub servers, free of charge. This allows you to still benefit from the ease of use of our Virtual Studio devices, regardless of where you live.
Learn more on jacktrip.org.
November 9, 2020
