[Discuss] suggestions for low latency Internet audio conferencing software suitable for performing music?

[Shirley Márquez Dúlcey]

The first requirement for such a system is a low latency codec that is
designed for music. Most commercial teleconferencing systems fail the
second criterion; music sounds terrible through them. One possibility is to
use uncompressed PCM, which is quick to encode and decode but uses a lot of
bandwidth. If we need to keep bandwidth down, Opus is the best open source
candidate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_%28audio_format%29

Teleconferencing also requires a low latency video codec. I don't know of
any good open source codecs for that. The ones that are used for streaming
and for storing movies all have very long encoding delays, in the hundreds
of milliseconds or more.

Internet latency is also an issue. Some ISPs are much better than others,
and there is also the issue that peering between different ISPs sometimes
happens at a distant point. Users will want to use wired connections
because WiFi adds a significant amount of latency.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 7:34 PM Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:

> So lots of people are switching to virtual meetings via video
> conferencing for many activities.
> Whether proprietary (paid or free sample) or open source, they seem to
> assume people taking turns talking to each other.   This model works
> very poorly for people trying to play/sing music together due to
> latency.   Obviously software can't eliminate the latency caused by
> the network itself, but if you are trying to do this in a metropolitan
> area among people who normally meet in person, it seems like it might
> be possible.  I've done some Google searching for both free and
> commercial software to do this and haven't found anything with the
> ease of use/low cost that amateurs would want.  Any suggestions?
> Depending on hardware/software what kind of latency can you get from
> VOIP systems?
>
> Thanks,
> Bill Bogstad
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