What’s New?
- Feedback detection
- Network outage indicator
- Windows terminal bug resolved
- Performance improvements
Feedback detection
If you’ve ever been to a live music performance, you’ve probably heard feedback. It’s that loud screech generated from a microphone getting too close to the speakers. Because JackTrip preserves your original sound with minimal delay, it is sensitive to the same problems.
With JackTrip, feedback often happens when you forget to use headphones. If you’ve ever connected to a studio before you plugged them in, or selected the wrong output device by accident, you may have encountered feedback. Don’t feel bad, we all do it sometimes!
JackTrip 1.10 introduces feedback detection, which is now enabled by default. We’ve implemented this in a manner that doesn’t introduce any additional latency. If JackTrip detects feedback on your microphone, it will automatically mute your input and turn your monitor output to zero. This helps save everyone’s ears by minimizing the screech.
After you correct the source of feedback, you can just unmute yourself to continue.
In case you ever run into any problems with JackTrip muting you when you think it shouldn’t, please let us know! If necessary, you can disable feedback detection under the Advanced Settings menu.
Network outage indicator
Although we don’t recommend it (see here for why), JackTrip can work on WIFI and other wireless connections. One of the big problems with all wireless technologies is that they experience regular outages of network connectivity. When using JackTrip (or any low latency audio software), you can literally hear them.
Network outages used to sound more like static. We’ve made huge progress minimizing their impact on what you hear through improvements in loss concealment. Sometimes you may not even notice it. Other times you may still hear something that sounds more like a warble. It just depends on how bad your outage is at the time.
Previously JackTrip didn’t report when these happen. Even worse, it may have reported misleading statistics and said that your connection was “Excellent.” JackTrip 1.10 will now let you know when network outages are happening by displaying it in the “Network” status section of the interface.
You may think, “why not just always plug into Ethernet?” Unfortunately, just plugging in the cable doesn’t mean that your computer is using it. We’ve found that sometimes you may even have to disable WIFI for your computer to start using Ethernet. Way too often I’ve found myself connecting to a studio thinking that I was using Ethernet, when in fact I wasn’t. This new indicator is one more tool to help you know when something is wrong and how to correct it.
Windows terminal bug resolved
Normally I wouldn’t make a big deal about bugs in a product update announcement, but I felt this one deserved a special mention because it has plagued Windows users for over a year. Did you ever open JackTrip and see an additional black Window with a “WEAK-JACK” warning in it? This was caused a bug Microsoft introduced in an application that is part of Windows (called “Windows Terminal”), and pushed out to all Windows 11 users in October 2022. It’s taken quite a lot longer than we hoped, but they finally fixed the bug.
You can get rid of that extra window by upgrading to the latest release of the Windows Terminal application available in the Microsoft Store. In case your computer hasn’t been updated yet, the window will now also display a more friendly message with instructions on how to fix it.
Performance improvements
Performance improvements are also something I normally wouldn’t mention, but these are substantial. First, we’ve reduced the CPU usage of JackTrip by roughly 50% across all platforms. Even with all the robust features we offer to provide the most authentic, best quality sound, JackTrip clocks in at only about 7% on my MacBook Air laptop.
We also made improvements to our loss concealment technology so that it adapts to a wider array of computer and audio interface hardware. If you have an older laptop or slower audio interface that may have struggled using JackTrip before, please ensure that “Loss Concealment” (under Advanced Settings) is “Enabled,” give it another try, and let us know how it goes!