FarPlay: Low-Latency Audio over the Internet
Hi everyone, Dan Tepfer here, co-creator of FarPlay. As a skeptic myself, I appreciate the skeptical tone of this thread. And I&#x27;d like to address a few points made here about FarPlay and low-latency audio.<p>First, a little about me: I&#x27;ve been coding for most of my life (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SaadsrHBygc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SaadsrHBygc</a> for my NPR Tiny Desk Concert of my improvised algorithmic music project Natural Machines) but I&#x27;m first and foremost a musician. I make my living playing concerts around the world as a pianist. During the pandemic, I used JackTrip to perform remote livestream concerts with some of the greatest musicians in jazz: Christian McBride, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ben Wendel, Gilad Hekselman, Fred Hersch, Antonio Sanchez, Melissa Aldana, Miguel Zenon, Linda May Han Oh and others. This is just to say that music, and particularly rhythm, is very important to me, and that I care about low-latency audio as an active practitioner.<p>Someone in this thread wrote that for rhythmic (groove) music, latencies of 3ms are noticeable, and latencies higher than 6ms are prohibitive. This isn&#x27;t the case. Sound travels in air at about 1ft per ms, so a latency of 3ms is equivalent to playing with someone 3ft away from you, which is obviously unnoticeable. 6ms is equivalent to playing with someone 6ft away, which is also unnoticeable. James Brown grooved his ass off with his band spread out over a relatively wide area on stage, long before in-ear monitors, which confirms what the research says: even for advanced professional musicians, latencies up to 20ms (equivalent to 20ft in air) are not significantly noticeable even for intricately rhythmic music. Here&#x27;s an excerpt over JackTrip with Christian McBride, where at the end, we play a demanding bebop head in unison, a very tough test of latency: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;?v=1076063889493342" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;watch&#x2F;?v=1076063889493342</a>. Above 20ms, things do get noticeable, but depending on the type of music you&#x27;re playing, it&#x27;s possible to adjust. It starts to feel like the people you&#x27;re playing with are, as we say in the jazz world, &quot;laying back on the beat&quot;. For example, I did a livestream performance for the French Institute in NYC last January with pianist Thomas Enhco in Paris and myself in Brooklyn, 3500 miles away, and despite a clearly noticeable (to us) ~40ms of latency, we were able to make real music together, including rhythmic music. Note that at the time, using JackTrip, I couldn&#x27;t accurately estimate the actual latency, and this 40ms figure is a guess. FarPlay, in contrast, measures the current latency and displays it on the connection screen.<p>Someone mentioned Jamulus. I&#x27;ve tried Jamulus, and for my professional needs, which include rock-solid stability and the lowest possible latency, JackTrip is far superior. But JackTrip, as someone else pointed out here, is impossible to use for the average user. It requires opening ports on your router, interacting with the command line, and installing and using Jack, which itself is forbidding for most users. Our goal with FarPlay was to take the best elements of JackTrip, unbeatable stability and latency, and make them easily accessible.<p>SonoBus is also mentioned in this thread. SonoBus is an excellent project which we only came across a few months ago. We&#x27;ve tried it, and we&#x27;ve found that if you measure the actual sound-to-sound latency, i.e. the time from sound production at the source to sound reproduction at the destination, FarPlay achieves lower latencies than SonoBus, probably because of the way it processes audio internally. Also, we believe our interface, which we&#x27;ve put a lot of thought into, is easier to use for non-technical musicians than SonoBus. Another advantage of FarPlay over SonoBus, this one particularly important to me as a live performer, is Broadcast Output, which is an essential feature of JackTrip that FarPlay co-creator Anton Runov and I invented (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farplay.io&#x2F;about#history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farplay.io&#x2F;about#history</a>). To play in low latency, it&#x27;s often necessary for the musicians to tolerate artifacts in the audio, since some audio packets inevitably get delayed on their way. Broadcast Output allows you to play in low latency with artifacts in your headphones, while simultaneously outputting artifact-free audio for live broadcast or recording. To me, this is the holy grail of remote performance, allowing us to have our cake and eat it too — ultra-low-latency interaction with no sacrifice in final audio quality (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farplay.io&#x2F;tipsandtricks#broadcastoutput" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farplay.io&#x2F;tipsandtricks#broadcastoutput</a>). I should mention that FarPlay only allows one-to-one connections at the moment, while SonoBus allows multi-user sessions. We plan to add multi-user sessions to the FarPlay user interface soon; our underlying processes already allow them.<p>Some of you are nitpicking our claim to not require third-party software. Remember, we&#x27;re coming from JackTrip, which requires users to install and use Jack in addition to JackTrip. On Mac and Linux, there is no third-party software whatsoever required. On Windows, low-latency audio is currently impossible without ASIO drivers. Many musicians on Windows have audio interfaces with ASIO drivers already installed, so in their case there are no additional downloads required. If you don&#x27;t have an ASIO driver, you&#x27;ll have to use ASIO4ALL, but this true for any software doing low-latency audio on Windows. In essence, FarPlay is as self-contained as it can be at this stage.<p>Someone asked if FarPlay will connect two users on the same LAN. The answer is yes, it works great.<p>Someone else brought up the advantages of low-latency audio not only for music, but also for regular conversations. We wholeheartedly agree: conversations feel vastly more natural without the awkward delay added by Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp and regular phone calls. FarPlay also transmits uncompressed audio, so the quality is as good as your mic and sound card can provide, which also helps conversations feel more real.<p>In conclusion, I want to thank you for bringing your attention to FarPlay, and if you enjoy playing music with other people, we&#x27;d love for you to try it! It&#x27;s really quite magical, I feel, and the magic hasn&#x27;t worn off for me even after having done it regularly for over a year. We&#x27;ve tried to make the process of using FarPlay as frictionless as possible: you don&#x27;t even need to register for an account to use it, just download it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farplay.io&#x2F;download" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;farplay.io&#x2F;download</a>) and go.<p>Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate,<p>--Dan Tepfer
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dantepfer.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dantepfer.com</a>