If you tested several installed solutions and want to give your opinions and learnings please post here.
From Jacktrip - Mailing List
Jacktrip - the user needs technical knowledge, probably the most challenging of all but may have the best latency.
Sonobus - easy to install and use. The GUI is very slick. There is a lot of functionality there and takes a little getting use to but it works very well. The guy that developed it is on this forum and has a Sonobus forum also. Not sure how many clients can connect. Probably the most user friendly of all.
Netty MacNetface - easy to install and use. Can have up to 8 clients and the developer has another implementation called music 101 which is for larger groups.
Jamulus - good solution and this one I got my band to use and it worked well. I don’t think the latency with this one is quite as good as the others but it is very close.
Jamulus: I tried Jamulus back in March & was happy with it but I struggled to get any interest at all so soon after lockdown - the assumption being that by May it would all be back to normal and anyway an ethernet cable was ‚much too hard‘.
Sonobus: Thanks to the recent discussion on here I tried this out last week between (FTTC) and iPhone (4G). I was very impressed by this so I’ve now acquired an iPhone/iPad Ethernet adapter.
Jacktrip: This works OK but ease of use will require attention for some of my musician friends. I do like the Virtual Studio approach though and if I can get it working well enough then I’ll look at some local fundraising to help more members get on board. I’ve tried the RasPi with several (unsupported) low cost USB audio devices to try to keep the overall cost down and now have the HiFiBerry board available to test. I’d eventually want to have this run turnkey though - headless and to auto connect to the group’s server from switch on - to make it as easy as possible. Some local user control of headphone volume would be important.
Add-On: now the first test with SonoBus and two „HiFiBerry DAC+ADC pro“ connected over internet:
Single Way Latency of 12ms (according to SonoBus measurements) which is similar to two players with a distance of 4m
Wow, this is much better than I could achieve in LAN… What does Ping Test - www.geschwindigkeit.de show you as median? What ISP do both of you have? Congrats!
Upvote for Jacktrip, specifically the new „Virtual Studio“ version. A jazz big band I have connections to is currently doing test rehearsals on the platform. The way things are going, it looks like they will stick with the solution.
One great thing about the Jacktrip solution is that it also works with Jamulus clients. So, the reasonably tech-savvy folk with good enough equipment (computer, audio interface) can use Jamulus. For all others, the Raspberry Pi is the way forward to minimise the complexity of IT support.
Also, the experience so far is that an official managed Jacktrip server is a better and more stable Jamulus server than most real Jamulus servers out in the field! This is maybe due to well-proportioned virtual machines with whatever cloud provider is being used.
With my little Irish Folk band, we started on SoundJack, migrated to Jamulus and now continue with Jamulus Clients but on a JackTrip server. It’s the best rehearsal experience we’ve had so far.
Happy to hear you’re happy! Can you share some measurements, and hurdles you had to solve e.g. connecting a Jamulus to Jacktrip user?
What server do you use from Jacktrip for what cost?
What has driven you off SoundJack.eu?
I had very good latency results, did you too?
Was the user interface a problem?
Unfortunately I don’t have any measurements – Primarily, we wanted to get the rehearsal off the ground. it worked well enough, and I didn’t have the patience to write down any numbers. Connecting to the Jacktrip server from Jamulus is super easy, you just use the IP address which is reported by the Jacktrip web interface once the server has started up.
The Jacktrip servers are still in their free phase for now. Since we’re only 4-5 participants, the smallest server will always be adequate.
The problem with SoundJack was that quite frequently something would break. Until the rebrand it only happened occasionally and was merely mildly annoying. It became unacceptable once the site got completely rebranded; only certain browsers would work on certain platforms, support for older macOS versions was broken for a while, etc. Every single rehearsal there was a new hurdle which hadn’t been there a week or two before. Several times we wasted most of the rehearsal just trying to get things to work.
Maybe SoundJack has since stabilised without stuff breaking twice a month, but even then, we wouldn’t go back. From our subjective experience, SoundJack’s technical advantage of being peer-to-peer is merely hypothetical. We didn’t feel we had worse latency on Jamulus/JackTrip. And the rock-solid stability of the JackTrip solution is a big plus.
There’s a small negative point about the JackTrip solution as it currently stands – When using a „JackTrip Device“ (Raspberry Pi), there’s no personal mix. Jamulus users however can still use the personal mix feature. My understanding is that the JackTrip team are well aware of the caveat and are working on it.
The lowest latency I will get is with sonobus and the Raspi 4 with HiFiBerry DAC+ ADC Pro (This is the same hardware as Jacktrips Virtual Studio Device, which seems to be not yet available in Germany, so I had to build it on my own). My test some weeks ago was not accurate enough, but I could play a low speed duet via a 50km internet distance already (at that time without the HiFiBerry). With sonobus I tested 7 Raspi’s creating a CPU load of about 70%. I estimate with Raspi and sonobus the maximum will be at about 10 participants. A faster Linux hardware may give room for some more participants. Switching to a Jacktrip server for higher number of participants may be a better choice then. I can also imagine that connecting via a Jacktrip server may not add that much latency compared to Peer-To-Peer Sonobus, but I did not test yet. With 16bit PCM Audio, Sonobus has about 1Mbit/s upload and 1Mbit/s downlaod traffic per participant. With VDSL, I have about 40Mbit upload, 250MBit download and a rather fast 12ms ping-latency speed test. Cable Internet seems to have a bit more latency