In recent years, many of us musicians have started playing in remote jam sessions using real-time audio platforms. Network latency is usually the biggest obstacle to maintaining tempo synchronization and rhythm changes. What techniques or settings are most effective for minimizing delay and jitter? How does network infrastructure (fiber vs. Wi-Fi) affect the quality of interaction? I'd love to hear your experiences and recommendations.
What's the impact of network latency on synchronizing online jam sessions?
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Network latency is often the limiting factor when trying to keep tempo in an online jam session. From my experience, connecting devices via Ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi already cuts more than half of the jitter, since Wi-Fi introduces packet loss and unpredictable timing variations. Fiber optics, on the other hand, not only provides higher bandwidth but also lower propagation delay variation—critical when musicians are within 50 ms of each other.
As for setups, lowering the audio buffer size (e.g., to 64 or 128 samples) and using low-latency drivers like ASIO or CoreAudio helps a lot, though it increases CPU load. Another effective practice is using dedicated servers with custom UDP protocols, which avoid TCP overhead and reduce retransmissions. I’ve also tried locally summing signals before sending them to the central node, so only critical instruments are transmitted, reducing bandwidth usage.
What if musicians are spread across multiple continents? Have you tested an "edge-node" architecture that replicates tracks at intermediate points to shorten the physical distance between participants? I’m curious whether the extra infrastructure complexity is worth it.