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Question

Musicians rehearse in real time over the net.

May 31, 2012 9:34PM PDT

I am a professional musician who has a cd project with a musician 3000 miles away. How do we rehearse over an internet connection eliminating the "latency"... Thank you all interested musicians and others who have conquered this problem. I have heard there is a 'Service" you have to pay for to be able to stream back and forth LIVE. Anybody know this service, if it is necessary, and if it is...how much does it cost. Thank you so much everybody!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: latency
May 31, 2012 9:56PM PDT

Even if you had a direct glass fiber connection between here and there, there would be latency of at least 15 milliseconds (the speed of light in vacuum is about 200 miles a millisecond). For normal use of Internet, with say, 10 servers between here and there, 100 milliseconds is a good time for a short message to go from here to there.

But, as there is no guaranteed delivery in 100 ms, some of 'packages' used by a real message can be delayed or even get lost totally. Then the receiver can ask the sender for a retransmission (you wouldn't want your downloaded copy of Windows to have 'holes', would you?). That's why the usual streaming solutions buffer a few seconds of video and sound before presenting it.

Let me mention what I read in a test by our local Consumer Reports. There can be up to 5 seconds difference between showing a television broadcast from an analog over the air transmission (fastest) and a 'digital TV-via-internet'-solution because of all the processing and buffering that's done somewhere in between. And that's still considered LIVE.
However, the usual VOIP calls are much better.

I never heard of the 'service' you mention. Why not ask the one who told you about it?

The usual service for this is Skype. I expect a 200 ms latency, which is quite acceptable for long-distance calls. It might be possible to speed it up a little bit by using 2 simultaneous connections (one from A to B, one from B to A) via 2 computers on each site, but I'm not sure of that.

Kees

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Answer
In short: You don't
Jun 1, 2012 1:32AM PDT

In short: You don't. As Kees already mentioned, the laws of physics simply do not allow for it, let alone the realities of the Internet. So if someone is trying to sell you some kind of service for this, then it is a scam. The best you could probably do is have an open phone connection, since the way the phone system works, it creates a direct circuit between you and the other person, but even then I would expect some level of delay.

What I would personally suggest, is that you get a second person to play your partner's half of the tune, but only record your half. Your partner then does the same. Save it as an MP3 to a CD, whatever. You exchange your respective parts which you can play back on your own and then use that as a sort of surrogate for practice.