Introducing JackTrip Soundscapes

Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of JackTrip Soundscapes, a new platform which transports Virtual Studio musicians into realistic environments that replicate the sound of locations within the physical world. JackTrip Soundscapes is powered by a patent-pending, cloud-based digital signal processing (DSP) engine designed to provide authentic online experiences for groups of any size.

Soundscapes Features Smaller

The launch of this new platform is only the first step of a longer journey. We are opening this up to the world to help us build a vast and open library of immersive sound environments. All JackTrip Virtual Studio subscribers can now use the Soundscapes web interface to design, load, save and share new environmental presets (our free tier will provide access to built-in presets only). Soundscape presets are powered by signal chain plugins (or “links”), and we’re releasing our initial library of plugins via an open source repository that we welcome audio engineers to help us enhance and extend.

At JackTrip Labs, we believe that immersive online experiences start with authentic sound. Authentic sound requires ultra-low latency, high quality, and realistic environments. We are excited to lead the way in all three.

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This is awesome! I could play with the reverb options all day :smiley:

Wanted to highlight the upload/download feature- you can save and share whatever soundscapes you come up as a .json file and share them with others to try out.

Here’s one I was just playing with- uses a spatial panning link as well as two reverbs for a dreamy effect that sounds great on electric guitar + vocals

Andrew’s Spatial Double reverb.json (4.6 KB)

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Great news but the Your Studio is getting an update / Let’s Go popup won’t go away no matter how many times you click on it on iPad or iMac. Can’t do anything until this damn popup goes away.

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This is awesome! I can see soooo many uses for this!

And when I was playing with the presets (both for Soundscape, and for specific reverb settings) my partner couldn’t hear the effects on her voice. I could hear it on both our voices, and she could hear it on mine (I’m admin) … but is there something I’m supposed to do, or she’s supposed to be able to hear the effects on her voice as well?

We’re both using Analog Bridges

Check her device settings- your partner might be on Low or Medium quality, in which case she wouldn’t get all the FX applied to her. Try switching to CD quality and see if that does the trick

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This (popup not going away) bug seemed to triggering with certain browser/device combinations. It should be fixed now. Thanks for calling it out, and I’m sorry for the disruption!

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Mike, I’ve been hoping for a panning option that would allow us to assign pan values to indvidual bridges (e.g. full left for bass, full right for tenor, half-left for alto, half-right for soprano: most useful would be able to pre-set such a pan value per subscriber. Also being able to adjust volume individually per bridge (very useful to find who is buzzing). Are these capabilities included yet and I’m missing them?

You can adjust individual device volume via the “Devices” tab of a Studio. We haven’t yet implemented groups or group panning, but these items are in our roadmap.

We just pushed out an update that should make the Soundscapes experience more consistent for users of ‘Medium’ and ‘Low’ quality (i.e. Jamulus). Using ‘High’ quality will always yield the best experience, though. If you have trouble with ‘High’ quality, try switching “Input channels” for your device from 2 to 1 (under Advanced settings).

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Today we ran into an issue where we weren’t getting stereo back from Jacktrip.
It was the first time I saw the soundscape feature. I noticed the ‘Bypass to FX’ was set to ‘off’. When we set the ‘Bypass FX’ to ‘on’, we got Stereo. 2 of use were fine, but one person was only coming through on the left side. When we set ‘Bypass FX’ back to ‘off’ we again were all hearing in mono.
Note: We use the Jacktrip box/device.

Hi Mark, turning on ‘Bypass FX’ effectively disables all audio processing for the studio, so that you hear everything echoed back exactly as it was sent. The default preset for Soundscapes (“Standard”) will pan all audio to the center, similar to how the “AutoPanMix” mixer worked previously. Other presets work differently. For example, the “Rehearsal Room” automatically pans each person across 9 slots from 50% left to 50% right. If you only have 3 people, it will only use the first 3 slots (which would all be on the left side). You can modify this by changing the number of “Auto Pan Slots” (perhaps to 3), and also changing the range over which they are distributed. If you are still having trouble, I recommend creating a support ticket to arrange a time for someone on our team to jump on the studio with you and take a closer look.

Here’s a link to the help page for JackTrip Soundscapes