Jam Online With Ninjam, Skype For Musicians
Justin Frankel, creator of Winamp, innovates again. He announced a new project, Ninjam, that allows multiple musicians to jam online with actual audio (not MIDI). Pretty friggin’ cool. Geographic constraints are no more. Sorta.
“Streaming audio…wouldn’t that create huge latency issues..” you ask? Justin explains:
Because latency is so important in playing music, existing voice conferencing over IP really wouldn’t work. So instead, we decided to just make latency bigger, not smaller. Latency in Ninjam is measured in measures, and that’s what makes it interesting. When you play, you’re playing along with the previous intervals of everybody else, and they’re playing along with your previous intervals.
Excuse me? I’m sure it’s crystal clear once you try it.
In any case, Ninjam is a very cool application that could probably allow all sorts of audio feeds. Imagine an entire album recorded in realtime from a variety of home recording studios across the globe…
(thanks to Brad for pointing out the announcement)
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Ted,
Thanks for the heads up, I’ll have to check out eJamming. I’m always a little leary of MIDI-based music…granted, it solves the latency issue, however, the “potential cheese” factor of the output becomes a risk.
MIDI jamming is best for rehearsals or straight jams and improvisations. Audio jamming is probably best if you’re looking to record and distribute the product of your efforts. Then again, there are some pretty good VST instruments now a days…
Thanks again, Ted!
-Mike B
Hi,
Great!
We tried with skype before
world-jam-wiki
http://oddwiki.taoriver.net/wiki.pl/WorldJamWiki/HomePage
and there is a “smaller kind” of an application for it ;)
wiki-Woodstock
http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/WikiWoodstock
having a global 24/7 jam session streamed by intrnet radio would be cool.
cu :)
Hi,
Great!
We tried with skype before
world-jam-wiki
http://oddwiki.taoriver.net/wiki.pl/WorldJamWiki/HomePage
and there is a “smaller kind” of an application for NINJAM ;)
wiki-Woodstock
http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/WikiWoodstock
having a global 24/7 jam session streamed by intrnet radio would be cool.
cu :)
Alan Glueckman from eJamming here.
Just wanted to let you all know that we put the Early Adopter test version of the eJamming Station for the Mac up yesterday (the PC version is coming in mid-September). Musicians can sign up for a Two Week FREE Trial, download the software and start eJamming now. Just know that this is beta, so expect some bugs and not all functions are fully enabled today, but we’ll be releasing new builds each week.
http://www.ejamming.com
Hope to see you in the eJamming Venues!
Anyone can hear the live jam if they have Shoutcast, that can be added by installing the latest http://www.winamp.com.
Just point to http://ninjam.com:8000/
It’s a nice novelty, but there is nothing more convenient than sending datafiles to a server, and using a forum. You don’t have to schedule meetings, and you get to rehearse your part before offering it. If you think about it, there’s a lot that is not practical about realtime jamming. You’ll do a lot of watching people rehearse. Datafile collabs are not going anywhere.
Hi there seems to be a new site cropped up recently http://www.jammingspace.com looks like it might be good
What we really need is a Last.fm crossed with myspace and then crossed with their own jamming software. We need a huge community for musicians as well as listeners. I don’t like the idea of jammingSpace, it would be much better if it just set itself up as it’s *Own* community and not require us join another site in order to participate in it.
I am looking forward to seeing what ninjam is like.
-Christopher, Who is A mutli insturment musician.
Might be worth checking out the new version of ejamming that uses audio. I was at Frankfurt Musikmesse this year, and it looks like they’ve made some exciting progress with realtime audio jamming on the net. They manage the latencies in a far more effective way than Ninjam, looking at what they were doing live on the stand at Frankfurt. Good stuff!
This Ninjam is very interesting. I have been hearing quite about this type of thing lately - jamming in real-time over the Internet. I know there is a company called eJamming based out of L.A that is doing something similar, and seems to have quite a few ducks in a row. Some of my musician friends are beta testing the product right now, and say it works great.
eJamming uses MIDI, but you can actually jam in real-time with very little latency. I think its worth checking out too. http://www.ejamming.com We may be seeing the wave of the future starting to peak its head out.