first time question --VoIP??

Hello – been looking at linux and ardour today for awhile. Coming to this from sony acid and 20 years of regular multitracking. Wondering if I can have a “live” session on ardour in 2 different cities using VoIP. Basically the drummer lives in Philly, I am in DC. We both have fairly equal studios, but transit time cuts into our playing. So if I could take a feed and give a feed at the same time…well that would be pretty spiffy.

any thoughts?

unless you play the sort of etheral stuff where you can afford half-second latency and it still sounds “just as weird”, i guess latency kills this idea. Also, voIP sound quality is horrendous through compression.

However, there is (was?) something called ardour-session-exchange, a cool tool that allowed remote people working on the same ardour project and keeping it ins sync by transmitting only changes. So your drummer in Philly would do a drum take, you recieve the session with the drum track, add some guitar or noseflute or whatever, and submit it back, and Philly can edit/add further, backwards and forwards. Data volume for actual new tracks is of course large (no lossy compression in Ardour!) but editing/mixing activity is “light” on data volume.

It’s a shame though that ardour-session-exchange is basically broken since ardour2 came along, it needs some updating regarding the session directory structure and GUI improvements. And no, I don’t have the time/skills to do it either, since you ask!

not via VoIP, which is generally very low quality.

what you need to do (and do not ask how here) is to get ices set up to do icecast-streaming. ices has JACK support and that will allow you to plug ardour straight into a “broadcast”.

i did a demo of this between Minnesota and Karlsruhe, Germany several years ago at a Linux Audio conference. there is a lot of latency (seconds of buffering). but it works, and is really suprisingly reliable.

you might also take a look at ninjam. the linux version has JACK support, and ninjam has an interesting approach to handling the major latency caused by network buffering.