Well, that was embarrassing.

On Saturday night, Mr. Karl Fury and I did a streaming concert, using JamKazam to play together, sending the whole thing out via electro-music.com.

Or so I thought.  Others didn’t agree — people in the electro-music chat room kept saying they couldn’t hear the guitar, and I kept saying, no, Karl’s guitar often doesn’t sound like a guitar.  And then when I went to listen to the recording the next day, it turned out that, so far as everyone but Karl and me was concerned, I’d done an intriguingly minimalistic solo concert.

No. Guitar. Whatsoever.

Karl is still speaking to me, for which I’m grateful. Fact is,  I broke at least two rules I stated in the previous blog post. First of all, I/we should have tested the whole thing end to end, playing through the electro-music test channel and making sure all the parts were coming through by actually listening to it via electro-music.com.  I assumed that what we were hearing in JamKazam was what was going out through the interface (and Audio Hijack) to the station. It wasn’t — a clear violation of the “always test everything end to end even if you think you know what’s happening”.  

Second, I potentially violated the “know your interface” rule, but I’ll hedge a little and say that knowing my interface would not have helped.  Fact is, JK takes over the interface completely and is FAR from transparent about what it’s doing, as I (re)discovered this morning when I went to see what I could learn from post-mortem inspection of the wreckage.  In retrospect, that makes a kind of perverse sense. We know that JK is always balanced on a knife-edge — it HAS to minimize latency at EVERY stage of the process in order to achieve reasonable synchronization over the network.  So it gets its grubby mitts into everything, and yanks hard.

As I say, I went to sort this out this morning.  I didn’t have much luck with an all-in-one-box approach — JK has clearly taken over all of the OS/X audio routing, but is not transparent or even sensible in what it offers (and by transparent, I mean even the controls and metering on the interface’s software mixer seem to be alternately powerless and lying to me),  For example, my input setup feeds it signal from the MOTU’s line inputs, on one track, and from its mic input on another (to serve as a chat mic, see previous post on this subject). I can get the mic to feed through, but not the stereo channel. No idea why, and nothing I do by poking randomly at it makes much difference.

So the moral of the story is this.   I’ll bet 5 bucks that you can’t stream from JamKazam without using a VERY inelegant approach — namely taking audio from the session monitoring headphone output on your interface and feeding it to a second computer that’s handling the Internet streaming and recording.   I’m about half an hour away from having that working right now… and that’s what we’ll be trying the next time.

Because, even if this was the first time in history that anyone has succeeded in getting a guitar player to turn down, you really do want to hear Karl play.  He’s really good.