JamKazam lets musicians play together live and in sync over the Internet from their homes with high-quality audio and high-definition video sessions. When preparing to play online and while in online sessions, musicians often need to adjust the level or volume of various audio components. We have recently taken some time to conduct a deep dive review of how these features have been working, and we’ve made some adjustments and fixes to improve the user experience in these areas.
Setting Levels on Audio Inputs
Before getting into a session, it’s good to check the input levels on your audio tracks to make sure you have plenty of signal strength to get good audio quality, but not so high that your audio clips or distorts. To do this, you should play or sing on an audio track and watch the VU meter (pictured below) on your audio track and adjust the input level so that you are getting to the top of the green lights, while peaking at your highest volume into the first one or two orange lights. You can adjust your input level either by turning the level knob up and down on your audio interface, or by pulling the slider on the VU meter up or down in our app (pictured below). We found a bug in the slider feature and have fixed this, so your input level controls will now work reliably and smoothly in the app.
Adjusting Your Personal Mix
When playing with others in a JamKazam session, each musician can use the controls in the “Personal Mix” section of the session screen to adjust the volume of each musician in the session to get their own mix of the session audio just right, however it sounds best to them. Each musician has their own personal mix, and their mix settings don’t affect what other musicians in the session hear. To adjust the volume of any other musician in the session, you can simply hover your mouse over the volume icon on that musician’s audio track, and then pull the slider up or down to make that musician louder or softer in your mix (pictured below). While these slider controls have been working well in general, we found one intermittent bug that could cause the sliders to stop working, requiring a click on the Resync button to get them operating correctly again. We have fixed this bug, so your personal mix controls should be fully reliable now in sessions.
Adjusting Overall Session Volume
You can also click the Volume button in the session toolbar to access sliders that let you control the overall volume of the session audio (versus the volume of individual musicians), and separately the volume of chat audio in the session (for any musicians using chat mics to talk in the session). We made a fix here as well so that this feature works better now.
Adjusting VU Meter Update Frequency
Finally, for users who have older and less powerful computers that may struggle with horsepower in larger sessions with more musicians, we have added a feature to let you adjust the frequency at which your VU meters update visually (pictured below at bottom of VU meter popup – see the “Fast” option in the list box control). This doesn’t have any impact at all on your session audio. It only affects how the app displays the lights on the VU meters. The default here is Fast, which is high frequency, but you can set this to Medium or Slow. This will reduce how much load the app places on your computer, which can help if your computer is older and struggling to keep up in larger sessions.
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 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 by a myriad of different groups 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.