I encourage everyone to use the tool that is right for them, but for me, I found the current options didn't allow me to make music with my friends the

gasnew / cedar

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2021-08-27 13:30:07

I encourage everyone to use the tool that is right for them, but for me, I found the current options didn't allow me to make music with my friends the way I wanted to--live with zero latency and no click track. Therefore, I built Cedar to make this possible; the next section explains how.

Using Cedar will be familiar to anyone who has used a video conferencing app like Zoom or a VoIP app like Discord: Open up a virtual room for your activity--in this case, playing music together--and invite people in. But what sets Cedar apart is that it achieves zero latency in musical performance without requiring a click track. That is where the Cedar musician chain comes in.

Most video conferencing and live music performance/jamming applications send audio data between all participants as fast as possible--or at least fast enough that the latency is largely unnoticeable. Unfortunately, there are two big problems with this approach:

As an example, if I live in Boston, and I want to play music with my friend in Seattle, my audio data has to travel to him and his to me, ~4,000 km each way. Assuming data travels at the speed of light, the data will take ~13 ms to travel each leg of the journey. If my friend plays perfectly in-sync with what he hears me playing, then what I hear is him playing along to what I played two-times ~13 ms ago, which works out to ~27 ms. That is well above the threshold where the human ear can start to distinguish latency and is thus a non-starter for a live performance scenario and, in my opinion, rehearsal scenarios.

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