My goal is to cook up an easy online jam space where anyone with a computer can join and play. No signups, no installs, no hardware configurations.
We still have to deal with the elephant in the room: location. We are bounded by the speed of light (for now), so jamming with people closer to you rather than across the country is going to be the biggest factor in your jam's success.
Online jamming comes with a few main challenges: latency and connectivity. Luckily there are ways to mitigate them on the technical side, and ways for you to mitigate them on your side. A few simple things, in order of importance, will make things better.
- Headphones are absolutely necessary. There are ways to counteract the audio output from coming back in, but it's heavy and for now not a priority. Preferably not Bluetooth, as that adds latency between the website, over the air, to your ears.
- An external USB microphone to capture sound, or even better an audio interface into your machine. These bypass the JavaScript microphone route, which is unpredictable (it's doing a lot of other things), and hook directly into your computer's much more reliable audio driver.
- A hard-wired connection from your computer over Wi-Fi can help a lot, but isn't always necessary.
- Shut down as many other programs and internet tabs as you can to help make resources available.