JamKazam delivers the lowest Internet latency of any online music performance platform. Read on to learn how.
Latency is one of the most important aspects of online music performance, and also perhaps the least understood. We are writing a series of blog posts to shed more light on the concept and nuances of latency. In this part 3 of 10 on latency (part 1 starts here), we discuss what is almost always the single largest source of latency – Internet latency – i.e. the time it takes digital audio to move across the Internet from one musician to another in an online session (highlighted in the latency pipeline below with a white background and blue text).
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Connectivity
One method of getting digital audio from one musician to another in an online session is peer-to-peer (p2p). In this method, one musician’s computer (a “peer”) sends its audio to the digital address of another musician (another peer), and just leaves it to the Internet to make delivery of the digital audio happen. In some cases, this works great. In others, not so much. Here’s why.
You can think of the transportation of Internet data as similar to airline travel. Airlines have hubs. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a hub city, you can often fly direct to most other cities – but if you don’t live in a hub, you must frequently make a connection, with multiple segments on your trip that slow you down. Similarly on the Internet, if I live in Dallas, Texas, and the other members of my band are in Dallas, it’s likely that my Internet audio will flow from my computer to an Internet hub in or around Dallas, and from there to my other band members’ computers. This will happen fast, with relatively low latency. However, if I live in Austin, Texas, even if the other members of my band are in Austin, it’s likely that my Internet audio will flow from my computer to an Internet hub in Dallas, or perhaps even Atlanta, Georgia, and from there back to the other members of my band in Austin. This will not happen nearly as fast, yielding much higher latency in my session.
Why does this happen? The companies that move data around the Internet have things that are like airline hubs, called IXPs (Internet Exchange Points). Your data hops from one “flight” to another at these IXP hubs. How your data moves across the Internet is dependent on where these IXPs exist, which companies are located at each IXP, and what rules these companies have put in place about what data goes where. You don’t feel the delay from suboptimal data paths when you’re browsing websites or sending an email, but you certainly do when playing music online with others.
Server-Based Connectivity
Another method of getting digital audio from one musician to another in an online session is server-based. In this method, one musician’s computer sends its audio to the digital address of a specific server, and this server then forwards the audio to the digital address of the other musicians in the session.
If all the musicians are located in a major metro area where an IXP is based, a server-based path may generate a latency result very similar to a p2p connection, as explained above. However, in other areas this server-based approach can basically “short cut” the Internet. Let’s go back to the Austin session example above. With an Austin server in place, it’s possible with a server-based approach that the digital audio from one musician could go straight to the Austin server and from there on to the other Austin musicians in the session, rather than passing through an Internet hub in Dallas or Atlanta. This would make latency much lower in the session.
JamKazam’s Unique Approach
With the information above now loaded into your brain, here’s where it gets interesting. Let’s start with this basic fact:
JamKazam is the only online music performance platform that has
implemented both p2p and server-based connection technologies.
Why does this matter? As the only platform that has implemented both p2p and server-based technologies, we can see from data collected from hundreds of thousands of sessions and users that:
About 60% of the time, p2p connections yield the lowest latency,
while about 40% of the time, server-based connections are fastest.
When musicians hop into an online session on JamKazam, our technology automatically chooses the fastest path to connect each pair of musicians. This means:
It is an incontrovertible fact that JamKazam delivers the
lowest Internet latency of any online music performance platform.
As anyone who has played music in online sessions will tell you, latency matters A LOT in terms of the experience you will have in your session. If you want to play music online, keep in mind that JamKazam delivers the lowest latency in the industry due to our unique ability to offer and automatically choose between two different connectivity technologies, optimizing your latency every single time you join an online session.
The Next Article in the Series
Our next article – part 5 in our series on latency – dives deeper into “jitter” and how it affects latency in online sessions. We’ll add a link to this article when it’s published.
Curious To See How This Works?
While we understand the natural skepticism many musicians feel about the ability to play together live in sync in online sessions, we’d point out that musicians have now played in more than 3 million online sessions on JamKazam. You can check out a small handful of sample performances in this YouTube video, with all the musicians playing on JamKazam from their homes over the Internet. Or see a ton more recorded JamKazam performances on our YouTube channel. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can do so risk-free by going to https://www.jamkazam.com and signing up for a free account. We have a support team that can help you get set up and playing online successfully in private sessions with your band or in open/public sessions with other musicians if you’re not in a band.