Live Streaming: The Bad, the Ugly, and the Worst!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Now that the damn Covid-19 bug has us shut in for the foreseeable future many of us want to reach out to our clients, fans, and the rest of the world with our music and other performance art. This is pretty damn easy on Facebook and YouTube for a solo act, or if all the musicians are in the same room. But we ain't gonna be on the same room any time soon, and we may also want to be able to add and switch from person to person online with us and play and/or interact in time with them. At the very least, we want to sound good, so what do we do?

There are only a handful of options at present and hopefully some coding genius(es) will develop some great software fast and make a mint in the process. In the meantime here's what I'm finding...

Three pieces of software have been loaded and tested in my studio and each has it's own problems.

ZOOM: Rock solid in terms of performance as intended, but it is intended for voice in a meeting. Any music with a dynamic and frequency range greater than the human voice is going to distort and be unacceptable. There's no playing together, but this link will help you get high quality audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50NoWIiYECA

By far, the best solution to solo live streaming a performance, and adding people. If they're performing music, they have to set it up as described in the link every time they start a new session.


OBS: This is a promising piece of open source software but it is clunky. You can create "scenes" and have videos ready to cue if you want to play to that, but it doesn't give you much control in terms of transport and on the fly changes. The controls that are there are frequently unresponsive. It also crashes every so often. I don't believe there is an option for multiple players.

Finally, there's JamKazam, which is intended for multiple players to play together in real time and eliminate and lag time (latency) between performers. If only one could get it to function properly. It freezes and crashes more than it actually functions. The controls aren't particularly user friendly. That said, as I am writing this a new update has just been released. I'll give that a test run tonight and get back.

In the mean time, your best bet for streaming as a soloist or group in the same room is Facebook. Unfortunately, eventually the video lags behind the audio and what you're playing (and what people are seeing) doesn't match. But the audio quality is decent (not great).

Instagram is ok and you can get viewers in a split screen. If it's something like a soloist and an accompanist, the accompanist is best to basically ignore the soloist and play the accompaniment, as there is a bit of a lag between the people in the split screen. If you try to follow the soloist you'll be out of sync. If you just play the accompaniment the soloist can synch to that and the audience will (hopefully) hear the soloist's version (assuming the soloist is hosting the session).

I haven't don't YouTube live yet and will be exploring that in the coming week. If you have any insights, experiences, or suggestions, please share them here. Thanks!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

THIS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50NoWIiYECA

[toofar]

I just recently came across this DAW plugin that deals with at least part of this issue:
https://audiomovers.com/

Ian Shepherd has a great video overview of it on his Production Advice site:
https://productionadvice.co.uk/remote-audio/

I haven't tried it out myself, but this thread seemed like a good place to mention it.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

The above Youtube link fixes the audio for music issue perfectly but you have to enable it for every session. At least it works, which is great news. Thanks for the links. I have a love stream at 8PST tonight so we'll see how it works...

[stubbsonic]

I enjoyed your playing very much. Amazing.

The sound was good. The audio feed seemed to only go to one channel (L), but I put a little mono-izer in my SoundSource feed and got a mono signal in both ears.

Really beautiful playing, Mike, and wonderful music.

[Prime Mover]

I've gotten JamKazam to work a few times, but it is janky. I'm on fiber, but I was trying to jam with an old bandmate up in Alaska and they're still stone-age up there. It sounds good on my end, but I can tell there's a slight delay. When he leads and I follow it's okay, but I lead, I can feel the tempo really start to lag.

It's a really dumb design though. It acts like it wants to be a free-for-all "Social Music Media Hangout!" But seriously... who wants that? No musician I've ever played with. Even in normal jam sessions there's a certain amount of unspoken "sussing out" of new folks. Add the complexity of distance and lack of in-room communication, technological limitations, no one's going to EVER want to online jam with strangers. This isn't Fortnite. I don't mind that being an option, but it shouldn't default to public hangouts. It should be built around solid point-to-point sessions first, get that stable, then add some options for public jams later.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I enjoyed your playing very much. Amazing.

The sound was good. The audio feed seemed to only go to one channel (L), but I put a little mono-izer in my SoundSource feed and got a mono signal in both ears.

Really beautiful playing, Mike, and wonderful music.

Thanks. I only had one mic connected. We spent the entire day finding out how to get decent sound and I didn't have time to add a second mic. Next time I'll have a nice stereo feed.

[stubbsonic]

FWIW, in LoopBack, I connected two virtual patch "wires" from my mic input and dragged one to left and another to the right, so it's feeding both outs-- that's a nice feature of loopback.

[daniel.sneed]

While solo performing over web, from one musician to one distant computer, Skype has been good to me.
Skype allows selecting any audio source.
Picture and sound flow are correct and in good sync.
I went with a good mic (Oktava 220 cardio), room reverb control through footswitch (off for speech, on for music), a pinch of aural exciter and a pinch of dynamic control.

[toofar]

The above Youtube link fixes the audio for music issue perfectly but you have to enable it for every session. At least it works, which is great news. Thanks for the links. I have a love stream at 8PST tonight so we'll see how it works...

Glad you found it to be useful, Michael. I don't have a need for the plugin at the moment, but I'm glad to have your feedback about it. Thanks.

Have to say, I was a little unsure about your 'love stream', but now I'm sorry I missed it.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Love stream? I’ve fixed that in posts elsewhere and didn’t notice it here. I won’t fix it now because members expect slow humor from me. I have a lot of class all low.

[labman]

I have a lot of class all low.