What’s New?
- New Studio Dashboard Features
- New Unmanaged Studio Servers
- JackTrip Desktop App Version 2.3.0
New Studio Dashboard Features
We continue to migrate functionality over from the original Virtual Studio web interface into our new Studio Dashboard. This update completes everything related to studio management, with the exception of advanced Soundscapes configuration (coming soon).
Advanced Audio Settings
The Settings tab now allows you to change your studio’s advanced audio settings. We normally do not recommend that you change these, but advanced users with great Internet connections can sometimes find adjustments to be favorable. The new interface makes it easier to understand what each setting does and any changes that you made from our recommendations. It also provides a convenient button to reset everything back to the recommended default settings.
Session Status
The new Session Status pane on the Overview tab provides a mechanism to start and stop new sessions, without joining them or waiting for a session to automatically expire. Most people will never need to use or look at this, but it can be helpful in certain circumstances.
New Unmanaged Studio Servers
Virtual Studio Servers power JackTrip sessions using software on the Internet. We normally manage these for you using best practices and the top cloud computing providers, so that you don’t need to ever think about it. This “Managed” approach is the best one for most people. However, if you and the people you are connecting with live far away from one of our geographical locations, you may experience too much latency.
Today we’re introducing a new “Unmanaged” option for you to set up and host your own Virtual Studio Server, using your own infrastructure, anywhere in the world. Unlike the previous ability to “self host” (audio-only) JackTrip servers, our Unmanaged Virtual Studio Servers offer all the same functionality with an identical user interface. Everything works exactly the same.
Hosting your own Virtual Studio server is not for everyone, as it requires advanced IT skills, including a strong understanding of things like cloud-native computing, network routing and firewalls, ingress, DNS, TLS, etc. If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with any of these topics, we encourage you to use our fully managed studio servers instead.
This is a premium feature that requires a paid subscription plan. While there are no limits on maximum participants or session duration, your plan’s concurrent session limits do still apply.
In tandem with this release, we no longer support the creation of self-hosted audio servers. Existing servers should continue to work as they did before, but this functionality is deprecated and we intend to remove support for it in the future. Please migrate to Unmanaged Studio Servers instead.
For more information, please see our documentation here. If you meet all of the requirements, we are happy to help you set it up!
JackTrip Desktop App 2.3.0
This week we also rolled out a new release of JackTrip’s Desktop App, version 2.3.0.
This features major updates to JackTrip’s “magic sauce” that makes online music collaboration possible. Its “Loss Concealment” feature leverages artificial intelligence to minimize latency, and this release fixes a few bugs while also improving audio quality and further reducing latency, in certain circumstances.
JackTrip 2.3.0 is now deployed on all managed JackTrip Virtual Studio servers. We recommend that you also download this update to get the full benefit of these latest improvements.