Soundjack |
by Prof. Dr. Alexander Carot |
Since the year 2005 the Soundjack software has been the result of Alexander Carot's musical experience and research activities in distributed music on the Internet. Once you are familiar with a few basic pinciples related to audio streaming on the Internet it will provide you the best possible quality- and delay conditions in order to play live music as shown in the videos below. However, you need to realize that the final latency depends on the physical distance, network
capacities, the actual network conditions and the actual routing between the involved peers. In most cases real musical interaction is limited
to physical distances below 1.000 km. It is important to understand that latency acceptance thresholds vary from player to player and furthermore decrease with an increased
performance tempo. Altogether the objective judgement about the feasibility underlies a complex process. In that context Carot recommends reading
the papers below or his final thesis here.
For further information do not hesitate to contact the author via email or meet him in the Soundjack chat below.
Soundjack Mac (built with OSX-10.6.8-64-bit)
Soundjack Windows (built with Win-XP-32-bit)
Soundjack Linux (built with Ubuntu-12.04.1-32-bit)
Soundjack Text Chat
Once you launched Soundjack you can choose between two modes - the automatic server based mode (1) or the manual p2p mode (2).
(1): In automatic server based mode type a username into the edit field and hit enter. In the third line you see your own entry uploaded to the network. Below the second line you see other users currently online. If you want you can use the text field as a simple chat. The second line "Group Connection" is supposed to work for large music ensembles of more than 4 players. In this mode every incoming stream is mixed at the server and sent to every connected user. This stream is an uncompressed one-channel stream with a block size of 512 samples. The group connection is currently in debug mode, which is why it is often disabled.
(2): In the manual mode you need to specify the desired IP addresses and ports yourself. This is especially useful for scenarios, in which you want to connect machines within a local area network (LAN). In this mode you do not appear in any other person's userlist.
Finally, in order to establish a successful Soundjack audio streaming connection you simply need to hit "ON" behind the respective user in the userlist. Then wait for 3 seconds max. If this doesn't work repeat the process one more time. If it still doesn't work you are dealing with a symmetric NAT, which is not suported yet. In that case you should ideally enable your router's portforwarding to port UDP 4401.
Additionally you can use a text chat, which will make text communication easier for you: Soundjack Text Chat