jammr Forum

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Hi all, I'm a noob to all things digital music and Jammr. With regard to actually playing music, I've picked up many instruments and never stuck with them, but always have a good time. I think the world of Jammr - thank you Stefan! I think this product is way ahead of its time, which is why it's so important and sometimes difficult to work with (not to mention being a 1-person show).

I've been meaning for a long time to try to sit down and get a good setup working. After spending nearly the entire day fiddling with it today, I thought I'd share some learnings in case it's helpful to anyone. Stefan is very generous with his time, but I think it would be helpful to have as much discussion of tech fiddling as possible on these forums. If anyone has feedback/comments, I'd love to hear them.


The mission:
—Get back to jamming with a friend from a decade ago - just jamming - no practicing, no sheet music, no preparation, just sit down and have fun for an hour or two.

—Friend will be playing piano, I'll be playing bass/keyboard/something else

—I'll also run background percussion, bass, and some chords from Ableton (or some other DAW if that turns out to be smarter) for backing tracks on my end

—Minimize hardware equipment needed (ha!) for travel / convenience


My equipment:
—Intel i7-7700HQ 2.8Ghz
—GTX 1060 GB
—Plenty of SSD Space
—16 GB DDR4 2400mhz
—Windows 10
—Keyboard with line level, headphone out, and usb out
—Ableton Live 10 Lite


Where I got to:
Using Ableton to run the bass / drum / chords loop, I had the best results as follows:
—Connect Ableton to Jammr using Voicemeeter (from the VB-Cable people) and use Windows WDM audio in Jammr. In practice this means Driver type = ASIO and Audio Device = ASIO4ALL v2 in Ableton, then click into “Hardware Setup” and use Voicemeeter and nothing else checked for “out”. Voicemeeter is the input in Jammr, and then Jammr outputs to regular computer speakers.

—Jammr metronome seems to behave better (I might be imagining this, but I thought I read a forum post a while back about a thorny coding issue with the midi timer) when I don't export midi clock, so just click the play button in Ableton right before beat 1 of the progression

—At the moment it looks like Voicemeeter (along with vb-cable) introduces too much lag to play my own instrument through Ableton so I'm going to look into an uber-cheap 2nd computer for this that will run an instrument (likely using a synth VST plugin with Jammr) or microphone straight into Jammr. This was true using the keyboard as a midi controller, and trying both headphone out and line level out. I realize that I could just listen to the local output of my instrument and not worry about it, but won't that mean I'm hearing something that sounds on-beat to me, but sending something that is lagged and off-beat to my jam-mates? Unless I'm wrong about that, my preference is to use Jammr's monitor, so I'm hearing everything Jammr and my jam-mates are hearing. One thing I found confusing - the lag almost completely disappears if I run Ableton straight out through my speakers, but running Ableton through Voicemeeter to Jammr and then out to the speakers from Jammr introduces too much lag for me. I would think the lag for a single instrument (backing tracks are fine) would be an issue contained within Ableton, but it appears to be influenced by where Ableton is sending its audio to.


A few other learnings:
—vb-cable is a cool idea, but I couldn't get audio to move all the way from Ableton to Jammr through it

—Jack looks like a powerful tool, but either I need to spend a lot more time studying it or it's not well set up for sending audio from Ableton to Jammr in Windows. (It could very likely be the former - please let me know if you know!). I couldn't find an option in Ableton to output to Jack from within the Asio driver. For some reason all of the Ableton/Jack information seems to be several years old, making me think that one of them dropped the other at some point.

—I went through all the speakers and microphones in the sound control panel and turned off the option for allowing programs to take control of them, and I turned off system sounds. That seemed to help although I was trying a lot of things at once rather than running an intelligent, controlled experiment.

—Loopmidi works perfectly to send midi clock to Ableton from Jammr if you want to go that way

—I also messed around with midipatchbay for a bit - don't need it at the moment but it looks like it would be helpful to send midi clock data from Jammr to several other devices at once


Other:
—That's about all I have - this post was meatier in my head than it appears when written, but I hope it'll be helpful to someone.

—If anyone sees something obvious that I'm doing wrong or has thoughts, please let me know!

—I would love to know what the lowest spec possible computer that I could run Jammr with is. If you have thoughts, please share!

(edited to add a couple more learnings)

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePyDm_MwcH0

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Fun jam last night!

DudeC - Guitar
Henlik - Guitar
Spoof - Drums, bass, keys + chaos

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QSE2am28WIGOo0Fe8ZOuVn89muMy-M8f/view?usp=sharing

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Over the past few days there was a greater amount of forum spam than usual. All spammers have been banned and the posts have been deleted.

Back to jamming!

Guitar player watiting for someone to join! Btw, the keyboard on the mac im using is half broken so communicating might be an issue.

This is a song I put together this week.

Istruments:

Guitar
Bass
Synth: Drums, Koto

Linux has mostly used PulseAudio for general applications and JACK for pro audio in recent times. PipeWire is a new audio/video system that can replace both PulseAudio and JACK. I have just tried jammr with PipeWire for the first time and wanted to share what I found so far.

The advantages of PipeWire include:

• Unified audio system eliminates the split between general applications and pro audio.
  
• No need to start/stop JACK daemon.
  
• Compatible with PulseAudio and JACK applications (qjackctl, virtual instruments, DAWs, etc).
  
• Unlike JACK, it's compatible with Flatpak.
  

I tried pipewire 0.3.26 on Fedora 34 with Focusrite Scarlett Solo and Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 sound cards.

The first gotcha is that pavucontrol's PulseAudio device configuration affects PipeWire. If you turn off a sound card in pavucontrol then it will not be available in PipeWire or JACK applications either! Make sure to set the device to the “Pro audio” configuration.

jammr can be launched as normal. There is also a pw-jack wrapper utility but it's not necessary if you have PipeWire installed with JACK support and the old jackd is not installed.

Instead of seeing the usual JACK “System” input and output devices, the actual sound cards are displayed. This will surprise you if you're a long-time JACK user . Selecting the appropriate input/output devices creates an audio connection from jammr to those sound devices.

The out-of-the box sample rate and buffer size is 48 kHz and 1024 frames (~21.3 milliseconds latency). Selecting a lower Latency value in jammr's sound settings does not seem to affect latency! The minimum buffer size can be set in the /etc/pipewire/ configuration files. Hopefully the defaults will be lowered so that it's not necessary to tweak the minimum buffer size.

Instead of editing configuration files I found the following environment variable affects the minimum buffer size:

This allowed jammr's Latency sound setting to take effect and it felt responsive again.

Next I tried running the Flatpak version of jammr. The JACK audio system did not show up in jammr's sound settings. It is probably necessary to pass the JACK socket to the application using a flatpak-run(1) option. I haven't investigated this yet but once it's solved I'll update the jammr Flatpak so it works automatically for all users.

Summary:
PipeWire can already be used with jammr. There are still a few gotchas but hopefully they will be eliminated as PipeWire matures. In the meantime you can use ALSA if you do not need to route audio between applications.

Hello guys,

I'm trying to get a way of having video (albeit out of sync) of people who are in the Jammr room with me during JammCasts. Basically I'm feeling a little guilty that I'm hogging the limelight during our jams.

I think I may have found a solution in:
https://youtu.be/vrZfb2zYupo

Would anyone be willing to both join in a Jammr Jam JammCast and also send video as well. If you wanted any social media links displayed for yourself on your video I'd happily oblige.

No worries if you'd prefer to stay incognito though 😁😁

Keep safe

J

yqodsi rocky JorgeWins LowDown

The Magic Groove

Lockett_00 on bass
YQ on Guitar
Spoof on drums, keys, loops

The full band. From around the world. Two basses, just in case. More guitars than Guns N' Roses. No compromises, no expenses spared. We did it, guys, we're semi-pro!

https://youtu.be/7gX6Js5FEa0

BassHammer - bass
choxsie2020 - synthesizer
edmelendez - vocals
FrostMelon - guitar
nicld91 - synthesizer
shavit103 - bass
stefanha - guitar, piano, drums
yqodsi - guitar

Praiser Jammr

Choxsi
JamesJam
Spoof

Late Night Spiral

Angushendrick
CHOXSI
JamesJams
Maguan
Spoof

MP3 File: Saved by the Bell

Choxsie
JamesJam
Maguan
Spoof

There is now a chat room available for the jammr community:
https://matrix.to/#/#jammr:matrix.org

Come join if you want to keep in touch with other jammr users or find people to jam with. The Element app is available on iOS, Android, desktop, and web.

Hey guys,

Returning tonight with lots of energy, missing my fretless bass untouched for a month.

Let's jam tonight. Last Weather Report sounding-like-ish jam (you may find it in Jammr Forum Recordings section) was memorable, with the huge contribution of TMW4 and Chris-O-Matic.

I hope they will be here again!

Let's make it a habit, it sounded so good…

Cheers,