Today’s news:

• JamKazam came back. I wonder if they weren’t just taking it down for a couple of days so they could build out added infrastructure — they gotta know everybody wants to jam.
• I experimented a little with NinJam, using JamTaba2’s OS/X version as my client, and a private server located in the UK. Its proprietor and I worked back and forth for a little while, and it seems as if synchronization is reasonable if not tight. I surely would not hesitate to use it for ambient collabs. Berlin-school, sequency stuff might be more of a challenge, or….
  • it might just be that NinJam’s built-in midi works like it’s supposed to. Hopefully I’ll get some time to play with that tomorrow (but I really need to concentrate on mixes for a forthcoming album of solo work, so
  • more on NinJam later.
• There is a third candidate, SoundJack, which I have not tried yet.

I also learned a good bit about what my gear is capable of. In theory, there’s no reason why most of the machines I have could not simulataneously run (eg.) JamKazam, an Internet radio broadcast client like BUTT or Ladiocast, and OBS to throw multi-camera video or other pretty pictures out to the net.

The reality, though, is that (with JamKazam in particular) that is not a really good idea. The main reason (mentioned in an earlier post) is that JamKazam really wants to impose its will on all your audio routing, at least under OS/X, so you really do end up needing a second machine to handle anything else. So happens I have a Linux laptop JLA (just laying around), so I fed it analog audio from one of the two headset outs on my interface, thus achieving separate volume control, and for a few minutes Karl Fury (in Princeton) and me (in Ithaca) played together and sent the dubious results out over electro-music.com (somewhere outside the US – if you know where the server really is, feel free to speak up – using BUTT as the streaming client.

Pretty cool stuff, but there are things to look out for. Buffer settings are important all around (and easy to get out of agreement, given the number of moving parts you have to remember to look at). And I can tell from our brief experiment that level-setting is going to be something of a nightmare. Well, a learning process, anyway. JamKazam’s metering sucks, and because anyone can set their own monitors wherever they want, agreement is difficult. Throw in a streaming client and it gets tricky quick. Got a lot to learn there.

And that process will continue tomorrow.