I’ve been playing with @wollethom and friends in Europe for several months on JackTrip. In general it is working very well playing jazz standards, and certainly very enjoyable. We identified a particular problem this week when trying to play in unison. I guess this will affect any larger groups e.g. SATB choirs in a similar way. The idea of synchronising metronomes using GPS clocks made me look at whether others had tried this already & I came across a project called The Global Metronome in a couple of papers - see (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~cc/153resources/theses/reid-oda-thesis.pdf) and (https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2016/nime2016_paper0006.pdf). These make reference to JackTrip so looked very interesting. I wondered whether anyone had implemented this or if this is now being achieved in a different or improved way? The JackTrip virtual studio metronome is very good (is this compensated or synchronised at the server or client end?) but we found it didn’t work very well for our drummer (who was using a Digital Bridge the last time we tried it).
Hi @rebholland, I think we’ve got all this functionality already baked in. JackTrip’s built-in metronome and backing track features (and any audio playback including previous recordings, stems etc) automatically synchronizes latency for everyone in the session. I consider it to be one of our key differentiating features, although we do a poor job today highlighting it.
I suspect the problem your drummer is having is with the digital bridge, which based on our most recent testing has serious performance regressions that likely make it unusable for live performance over the Internet. I hope to be able to work on an update that fixes that sometime next year.
To be fair, the paper you reference uses GPS devices which would be really cool and the most accurate, but JackTrip does not implement that. Instead, we measure your Internet connection and latency to make adjustments. Whereas GPS could be accurate to less than a millisecond, our approach is probably ± 3ms.