For the real-time collaboration (minus a subscription fee) can any of us help this guy?
Flat out, I don’t have the skills or experience.
this is quite a typical rPI scenario… tech already exists, someone wants to glue it together…
unfortunately writing glue is pretty tedious (and quite time consuming)
(thats why the cool/fun part - networking audio is already done 
)
what I would suggest (coz it not really my cup of tea) is :
try to get blokas involved… they are good developers, and they could add something like this to patchboxOS, and knock up a front end quite easily.
obviously, you would do it in conjunction with them initially with a PiSound card.
but they are good guys, they’d not limit it to PiSound (patchbox already supports other soundcards)
if I were doing it ‘selfishly’ (i.e. with what i have …)
Id be tempted to use a Norns/Fates - it’d be trivial to knock up a small UI on that.
but it doesn’t really achieve this guys aims, as the costs (even diy) are a bit high and its hard to get hold of, and the UI is not portable.
will it work well?
I actually have my doubts, I really don’t think it’ll work well over my networking, due to both latency and jitter - in a big town maybe. even then I don’t think real time jamming is possible…
I suspect the endlesss model of ‘clip submission’ is better for collaboration, (*)
the idea there is, you all run your own clock, and you’re just getting ideas ‘posted’ to you for inclusion.
I think this (mid term at least) is going to be the collaborative model, that we’re going to see increasingly in daws etc.
(*) actually people have been doing this for years, by posting files onto dropbox and various other solutions (splice?) - just endlesss have streamlined / packaged it quite nicely.
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Thanks for ideas and words
I am looking at endless…
Endlesss is fun … check out some of the private jams if you find the public ones too hectic!
(They are publish on discord - which I think endlesss recommends when you first join ?!)
has anyone installed tried endlesss yet? if you have, I could setup a ‘jam’ and share the link here… ( I’ve not bother till now, as wasn’t sure anyone was interested)
back to the how to collaboration possiblilies…
i took a better look at the link @keymanpal posed re: ableton’s suggestions.
one that stuck out , was “ninjam” , i remember this from a while back as some members at Lines were talking about it… i think they were trying to do something weekly.
so i took another look at how it works…and this was interesting…
sounds like a similar approach to endlesss, your not fighting latency, because audio gets sent in chunks, and is just played ‘in time’ when it arrives.
the main difference is (i think) ninjam is constant, so you’re always getting each others audio.
whereas endlesss is more clip/loop based.
Sort of?
The main difference is that if your group played a 12 bar blues pattern, NinJam users would be soloing over the wrong chords, and hearing each other play over a different set of wrong chords.
It works great for drones. Chord progressions longer than one measure, not so much.
Yeah that’s why you need syncing based on phrase or clip length - ableton link is a good model for this.
Link syncs the phrase, so it doesn’t matter if someone is using 4/4 and others 12/4.
That’s said it is aimed more at jamming together , and so musicians reacting rather than a performance where parts are preconceived/ performed.
Definitely an interesting area for development, and there will be different use-cases that need different solutions
Cool! Ninjam even seems to be open source! Thought it’s part of Reaper. Has anybody already used this?
Endless seams to be iOS only?
ninjam … at lines they used it, so some feedback there (not sure if they are still doing sessions ornot)
my quick take on it, was that it takes a bit of getting used to … as you are ‘behind’ everyone else.
(they mention, trick is to not move on too fast… so give others a chance to catch up)
endlesss, yeah iOS only for now .
-
andriod they want to do, but andriod is never easy due to its issues with audio latency.
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pc/mac - they are working on ‘endless studio’ which is going to be a standalone and vst version for pc/mac. theres a KS being launched soon for it, with ‘alpha’ release expected end of year.
(Im honestly, a bit surprised they they are not pushing out a desktop version sooner… surely they made if cross platform when they wrote it? and they have already teased some shots of it running - oh well!)
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Soundstage VR looks crazy
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/278478115332596346/D288EE4ACAF1E1FEA57B0ADC75D62BE6488DABF3/
and it seems to have some modular approach
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/767227751159258226/4C144059AA12586E0B3E347B06BD6822175ECD2B/
The original seems to be not developed any further, but it’s open source now and somebody has already taken it up again: https://github.com/plaidpants/soundstagevr
Only for one person currently on first sight though. This with multiple people, all fiddling on a crazy monster setup could be fun - and chaotic 
Edit: The new dev has added multiplayer as “would be nice” option to his list of things to keep in mind for future extensions. Yay! https://github.com/plaidpants/soundstagevr/issues/18
The Synthmulator mentioned in this thread also looks neat (more proof of concept…). Also “single player”. And more semi modular: https://picosacrogames.itch.io/synthmulator
This may not be the best thread for it, but I’m excited for Tilt Five to start shipping in a month or two.
(production is slowed, but still progressing.)
AR has always made more sense for music interfaces than VR, because you can still see your physical controllers, the other musicians you might be playing with, and (in extremely unlikely circumstance) the audience. You still look like an idiot, but this is forgiveable.
This particular implementation causes less eyestrain (it doesn’t force any particular focal distance), and they’re pushing a tabletop gaming model (so multiple users converge around a virtual portal, and interact with different parts of it.) But the SDK is a simple plugin for Unity or Unreal, so we’re not at all limited by what use cases they have in mind.
There is a lot of distance collaboration potential here, be it for virtual racks, or for straightforward DAWs.
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Wow, cool, didn’t have on the radar that this is close now. I have actually preordered one of these! Very compelling for a board game and AR/VR fanatic
The concept is actually nicely thought out: Several glasses can be connected to one PC (or even phone) which renders the geometry of each animation phase. And the individual glasses will do the transformation to the person specific perspective and actual rendering. Thus one can move the head around at will and get fluent matching frames at 180 Hz.
It’s not really playing music together out of the box, but one might be able to write cool collaborative apps for this! With several people in the same room one wouldn’t have the latency problem (but isn’t too Corona compliant. A world after Corona will exist though… ). In a remote scenario one would have the same challenges as all the other solutions of course…
Apropos remote board gaming: Some friends have suggested to do some virtual board gaming sessions via https://boardgamearena.com/. One monitor with the board, one with all the people via Skype, sounds fun! As close to a board gaming evening one can currently get
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I’m “Professor Z” on Board Game Arena, but I rarely think to log in.
If you’re on Facebook, feel free to add me there. My phone is always connected, and FB messenger is usually running.
And then, to keep this vaguely on topic, here’s a post where I raved about Tilt Five throughout the campaign.
(Lots of great videos there. But also a link to my profile.)
I’m going to say I shouldn’t jump into a board game until after this:
The bar is very high with those other panelists, and I still don’t know what I’m going to talk about.
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I guess you have all heard about superbooth at home!
Well ableton have announced Loop At Home for this weekend - could be interesting
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Dammit. I RSVP’d yes for a virtual birthday party less than five minutes before seeing this.
Stupid friendship. Dumb socializing. Grr.
I wish I could trust that they’ll make the archived stream public, but that’s never been their M.O. (traditionally, Ableton edits the best clips down to bite sized chunks when they have time, and doles those out those over the course of the next year)
Synth Society Summit is up, though. In case you missed that this week.
I play various board games with friends using Vassal. Works well for playing in realtime, but we mostly use dropbox for a play-by-email way of playing. You can log what you are doing and then the other players can step through that log step by step before doing their moves in return, etc. Takes a bit to get used to, but works really well.
Currently we are in the middle of a 4 player Fire in the Lake session.
Anyways, re VR: A package with Oculus Quest arrived at my doorstep yesterday. a new toy was necessary to help fight corona boredom. Haven’t got properly started yet, though.
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Vassal looks nice! Particularly for building own stuff. Boardgamearena is more for people who want to play licensed recreations of commercial games out of the box. E.g. we played Terra Mystica yesterday - which works great! There are two modes: Turn based and “realtime”. The only difference is that in realtime the time to make your move is limited to two minutes and in the turn based setting you have as much time as you want (can be configured, I think 2 days is the default).
When playing with friends there is no reason to use the realtime function. With step-wise one can stop at any time and continue where one left, but of course also move instantly after one other like one would do in a usual board gaming round, e.g. when being in the same Skype call.
Have fun with your Quest! It’s certainly the most convenient headset out there atm., everything should run out of the box with little to no configuration effort - and it is self contained, no PC needed. (I don’t have one, but that’s what I heard )
Oculus is a little the Apple of the VR world - officially it’s limited to the curated Oculus app store.
But it is also possible to use SteamVR /OpenVR applications even in wireless mode via Virtual Desktop (which needs a Windows PC then though). Obviously Oculus isn’t too thrilled about the possibility, so they requested the dev of VD to remove that feature. But he offers a patched version that can be installed via SideQuest, just google for “oculus quest virtual desktop sidequest”
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I’m less interested in competing against friends so much as teaming up with them. I wish board game arena had some of my co-op favorites.
Anyway, the time limit isn’t necessary for those either, as it’s always helpful to be able to pause a game if something comes up, but I do find that a lot of the experience comes from group discussions about how to proceed each round, so just taking our turns when an email shows up wouldn’t be as much fun.
It may well be preferable when trying to defeat each other, though.
EDIT:
Hey, look at that:
http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Pandemic