Your five utterly brilliant things about modern technology

[nicknack]

Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.

Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.

[Kim]

Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.

Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.

It's much easier to edit if they're playing at the same speed, so they're probably listening to something.  Which may be no more than a metronome.  Note they're usually wearing some sort of headphones to enable this...

[nicknack]

Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.

Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.

It's much easier to edit if they're playing at the same speed, so they're probably listening to something.  Which may be no more than a metronome.  Note they're usually wearing some sort of headphones to enable this...

Digital click tracks ensure everything fits together nicely.

[Kim]

I was under the impression that some bands are trying to have rehearsals with each member at their respective homes. Perhaps I was wrong; it wouldn't be the first time.

I'm sure plenty of them are *trying*

[nicknack]

I am not aware of a way that this can be done sensibly. Certainly we knocked the idea on the head pretty quickly. I'd be very interested to be proved wrong though.

[Kim]

I'm struggling to think of a way to keep the latency/jitter to an acceptable level without mangling the audio too badly.  Even the proper VOIP solutions are likely to add hundreds of milliseconds of delay.  There's got to be some buffering somewhere.  Especially if there's video involved.

I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network.  Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers).  No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.

I suspect any practical solution is going to be analogue.  For analogue values of practical.  And the speed of light still gets you with intercontinental distances.

[Zipperhead]

I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network.  Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers).  No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.

They got the midi working on this one https://youtu.be/SQHdFAm7g7E?t=1011

[Polar Bear]

1:  The all singing, all dancing navigation tool / camera / web browsing/ email touting, / instant messaging / video conferencing and lots lots  more "phone" in my pocket.
2:  internet and phone network connectivity for 1 above wherever I appear to want or need it.
3:  The big flat screen in the corner which just works whether I want boring old television, streamed services, to use it as my computer screen, casted content from 1 above, Zoom video conferences etc.
4:  3D printing and other modern manufacturing tech which can be rapidly switched without huge cost and expensive wholesale retooling to produce different things.
5:  Clean renewable energy.  Lots and lots and lots of it, and more and more and more to come.

[T42]

1. That I'm still alive.

Me too. 3 stents. Chum has about 8 and still does mountains.

[pcolbeck]

I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network.  Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers).  No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.

RTP-midi (RFC 6295) has a packet size equivalent to VoIP I think so the same latency issues. However it does include clocking information which the devices receiving the midi stream should use to synch playback against a local accurate clock source (NTP presumably) so they should all be in synch. Dont know it in depth but I would assume if the latency gets too great the midi player or at least the RTP-midi stack should just start dropping the packets (as there is no point playing them at that point) that took too long to arrive and you would get drop out.

[rr]

Single market making the provision of really obscure spare parts viable. I bought a model specific set of replacement drive belts for my 20 year old double tape deck from Portugal.
Oh wait!

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[Cudzoziemiec]

Or everybody records their own part separately and it's put together by a sound engineer? Which I think is what nick-nack said.

Yes, I think that's pretty much what happens.

It's much easier to edit if they're playing at the same speed, so they're probably listening to something.  Which may be no more than a metronome.  Note they're usually wearing some sort of headphones to enable this...

The ones I've seen, no one's been wearing headphones. But there's probably a metronome, presumably on flash mode, out of sight, and I expect a lot of these are pieces they know well anyway.

[Jaded]

If you ever want a gems of how much latency there is and how variable it is, when on a multi user conference.

Count “one two” having asked the others to say “three” as soon as they hear “two”.

[Karla]

1) Modern medical technology means I'm still alive
2) Modern dentistry means I still have something approximating front teeth, and wasn't screaming in pain throughout the process
3) Hmm, everything else starts to pale after those two.

[quixoticgeek]

5. Web conferencing that means people can do things like play music together in 'lockdown'.

I would like to know how as we tried it (Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp) and latency meant it was not possible.

I get this on my Facebook feed a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWF00hRfsX0

"We'll fix it in post..."

J

[Morat]

1. Safe navigation in cars. Gone are the days of balancing a map on your knee and looking up/down/up/down as you approach a roundabout with increasing panic.
2. I can see how much money I have left by looking at my phone and pay for stuff by bashing my phone on the thing. No more dread trips to the cash point to check balances and then walk away empty handed in front of the smugly silent queue.
3. Rechargeable Batteries that are worth buying, last for ages and don't need goat sacrifices before every partial charge.
4. Phone boxes are now cute anachronisms instead of vital lifelines. Remember when "Call an Ambulance" would be preceded by "Find a phone box or nearby house"?
5. Medicine. A visible demonstration being the way that Ambulances have evolved into mobile trauma treatment centres staffed by two specialist medics. They used to be little more than a van with two stretcher bearers.

[tonycollinet]

1 - I'm living the science fiction of my childhood.
2 to 5 - see 1.

[Davef]

I suppose if everyone was playing electronic instruments you could just send MIDI data over the network.  Given a half-decent connection that should get the latency down below human reaction time (after all, it works for the gamers).  No good for vocals and other instruments that can't be MIDIified, though.

RTP-midi (RFC 6295) has a packet size equivalent to VoIP I think so the same latency issues. However it does include clocking information which the devices receiving the midi stream should use to synch playback against a local accurate clock source (NTP presumably) so they should all be in synch. Dont know it in depth but I would assume if the latency gets too great the midi player or at least the RTP-midi stack should just start dropping the packets (as there is no point playing them at that point) that took too long to arrive and you would get drop out.

If you want a really accurate clock use GPS.


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[pcolbeck]

Well yes but GPS based NTP servers aren't the sort of thing most people have lying around. Quite common on enterprise networks as the primary time source but it's not exactly a home studio piece of kit normally.

[Kim]

Yeah, but they're cheap as chips and probably worth it if you're doing timing-critical stuff on a congested or asymmetric^[1] link.  It's not like home studios are common either.


_{[1] NTP should be able to measure and correct reasonably well for *consistent* round-trip latency, but it has no way of knowing if the inbound trip is faster than the outbound trip, as it will be for most consumer broadband connections.}

[Davef]

You could always build one yourself - https://vaxxi.net/log/android-phone-raspberry-pi-gps-ntp-server/


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[Kim]

You could always build one yourself - https://vaxxi.net/log/android-phone-raspberry-pi-gps-ntp-server/

What an absolutely terrible way of doing it!  That won't get you any more accuracy than NTP (though of course it doesn't need an internet connection, which can be extremely useful^[1]), as you've no idea what the latency of the serial data from the GPS is - to say nothing of the vagaries of Bluetooth.

Better to get a GPS receiver with a hardware pulse-per-second output (Adafruit and the like do convenient modules that don't involve any SMD soldering) and connect that directly to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO/serial ports.  That should give you precision in the microsecond range.


_{[1] I have a GPS feeding into ntpd on our Raspberry-Pi-based alarm clock, so that it knows what time it is if it powers up without a network connection.  I could have used a battery-backed real time clock, but it being a stratum-1 time server was more fun.}

[ian]

I'm impressed that my exercise bike keeps different time to my watch (which I assume slurps it's time from the Apple-verse) – in the space of a hour's workout, there's a good 90 seconds difference (the bike winning the race).

[hatler]

Eddies in the spacetime continuum possibly ?  Doubtless generated by the massive electric fields generated by your work out.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

I'm impressed that my exercise bike keeps different time to my watch (which I assume slurps it's time from the Apple-verse) – in the space of a hour's workout, there's a good 90 seconds difference (the bike winning the race).

It's all to do with Einstein's relativity theory. Einstein would have been a great cyclist had it not been for Hitler. Not many people know that.