Basically, the title. After years of inactivty, I’ll be taking music (cello) lessons again, with my teacher of yesteryear, from whom I’ve moved half a country away.
She has suggested Zoom but is open to alternatives. I don’t particularly like Zoom, plus I have a feeling better quality can be had through a custom solution - but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what exactly would be a good fit for this project.
Maybe Jitsi? Does someone here have experience with it and could tell me if it’s possible to set something like a “target” audio quality?
For hardware, I basically have two options. Both are already in use, for different things, and have sufficient processing capabilities - albeit no GPU:
- host everything at home. Plus: lowest possible latency from me to the server. Not sure how much that is worth though.
- root server in the Hetzner cloud: much faster network speed. Again though, not sure how beneficial that is, the ultimate bottleneck will always be my upload speed (40Mbit)
OK, I realize that this post is a but of a random assortment of thoughts. I’d be really happy about suggestions and / or hearing about other’s experiences with similar use-cases!
I’m not sure if this solves your problem, but it’s an opportunity to plug Jamulus . It’s FOSS, and one of the best solutions if your target is uncompromising sound quality/latency. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do video. I’ve jammed with a band on it and was very successful. Vide was on a phone or separate machine. When we performed, video was mixed by another user using OBS, and streamed on Zoom
THank you for the suggestion! It looks like a great option for playing together. I must say though, what would probably kill it for me/my teacher is the complexity of the setup. Separate video, and from the docs, it seems like a bit of an involved setup to get good results?
Besides, we will probably not be playing together at all 😅
It’s a bit involved to host the server but easier than most self-hosting services, in my opinion. Then there’s the audio setup which I think is super easy for digital audio folk but may be a challenge for folks who haven’t had to mess with digital audio much. The biggest thing people had problems with was turning off wifi and connecting via network cable. Reduced latency by leaps and bounds
Like I said, video was a separate device for my playing so it was kind of a non-issue. Mixing and production in OBS is way over my head.