What’s New?
- Improved Latency Indicators
Improved Latency Indicators
You may have noticed this icon in the upper-left corner of each participant’s video window. This is JackTrip’s latency indicator, and mousing-over it will provide a lot of useful information about their Internet connection.
If everything is normal, it will only show up as a faint outline when your mouse is positioned over someone’s video window. But if JackTrip detects a latency-related problem, it will always light up in red. This is an incredibly useful tool to help you minimize latency in your online sessions.
Internet Connection Jitter
Previously, our latency indicators only analyzed connections by measuring their round-trip ping times. This is a useful metric, but we’ve found that it’s not nearly enough information to portray an accurate picture. One downside, for example, is that JackTrip may have previously labeled a connection as “Good” or even “Excellent” when its actual quality was quite poor, causing a high amount of latency.
Our updated indicators now take into account the jitter of each person’s Internet connection, or how reliable it is at transmitting audio packets at a consistent rate. Internet connections can often report low average ping times, but have very high jitter. This is really important because correcting for high jitter requires adding latency.
A good example is the difference between Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet. These are very different technologies that provide dramatic differences in connection quality, even though their relative bandwidth (i.e. Megabits-per-second) performance may be similar.
Here what our new latency indicators will look like for someone who has everything set up correctly and well optimized, using Ethernet:
And here is what the same computer, network connection, etc. now looks like using Wi-Fi (6E):
6E is one of the most recent Wi-Fi standards, and older versions perform much worse. Long story short: don’t use Wi-Fi, unless you don’t care about latency. And for the best results, always use Fiber Internet connections.
Estimated Total Latency
Our new latency indicators include a new “Estimated Total Latency” measurement, which takes into account the entire signal path from every participant in your session. This estimates how long it takes for each person’s audio to reach your ears, and we also translate it into an equivalent distance in the real world based on how fast sound travels through air.
JackTrip will also break down the Estimated Total Latency into each step along the way, so that you can quickly see not only who is slow but also pinpoint where they are slow, which can help with understanding how to correct it. Note that although most of these are actual measurements, we currently only include rough estimates for audio interface performance. To get a more accurate measurement of that, you can reference our open database here.
Audio Quality Sliders
A few weeks ago, we introduced a new “Audio Quality” slider in the sound settings for your Studio. To find this, just click the “Studio” button in your toolbar (bottom of the interface when connected to a session).
The “Audio Quality” slider is another great tool to help you manage latency. It is used to set a threshold for how much jitter is allowed on each connection before JackTrip will fill in any gaps with its AI model predictions. Most people can leave this all the way to the left in the “Auto” position. Set this to a low value (say less than 5), to decrease jitter tolerance and lower latency. Set this to a high value to improve quality by also increasing jitter and in turn, overall latency. If you don’t care about latency, we recommend just dragging this all the way to the right to ensure that all audio is lossless.