Problems with latency and jitter

[EDODRISCOLL]

OK ... we're a band and currently trying to rehearse together remotely as we're all on COVID lockdown. I'm the vocalist and the last couple of days I've been trying to rehearse with guitarist. We're both using ADSL and both have fibre. We keep getting latency spikes and jitter ... ther's no consistency ... everything will be OK for 60 seconds and then they'll be a jump ... like a needle hopping on vinyl. I'm showing all green at home as is guitarist ... any ideas on what might be going on and how we can improve things please? Worried it's going to get even tougher when bass and drummer join in ...

[hotop1]

OK ... we're a band and currently trying to rehearse together remotely as we're all on COVID lockdown. I'm the vocalist and the last couple of days I've been trying to rehearse with guitarist. We're both using ADSL and both have fibre. We keep getting latency spikes and jitter ... ther's no consistency ... everything will be OK for 60 seconds and then they'll be a jump ... like a needle hopping on vinyl. I'm showing all green at home as is guitarist ... any ideas on what might be going on and how we can improve things please? Worried it's going to get even tougher when bass and drummer join in ...

We are having the same issue - based in Vancouver Canada - and there's just two of us.  We're getting a 200-300ms delay between us which is about as bad as Facetime or Zoom jamming. 
Can't find any means to optimize for this latency.  We were going to use Session wire but my lead singer/guitarist is on a PC (i know) and so that doesn't work.

[gadagomes]

Same issue in California with just 2 of us. I'm getting a delayed version of my instrument on the recording. Our first time trying, so hoping there's a way to fix this.

[ostaz]

Yep, same thing here in California.  We are going to try a wired connection next.  The timing is all over the place.

[Sue Wales]

OK ... we're a band and currently trying to rehearse together remotely as we're all on COVID lockdown. I'm the vocalist and the last couple of days I've been trying to rehearse with guitarist. We're both using ADSL and both have fibre. We keep getting latency spikes and jitter ... ther's no consistency ... everything will be OK for 60 seconds and then they'll be a jump ... like a needle hopping on vinyl. I'm showing all green at home as is guitarist ... any ideas on what might be going on and how we can improve things please? Worried it's going to get even tougher when bass and drummer join in ...

We have had this all day and addled around with all of the set up. Cant get rid of it. Most of us in Wales use 4G wireless routers but we plugged the cable into the back of the machine so on set up it tested fine. Then when we started to play together it went as high as 800 and just all broke down loosing packets etc. 

Can anyone tell me please if there is any fine tuning on packets and latency i can use and where is it. None of teh help videos or text pages where you can get help are working so pressume they are changing servers. Thanks Sue

[Tommy231]

WiFi and WDM drivers can cause this. If you are on a PC, use an ASIO driver, not a WDM driver. WiFi can have disturbances all the time, such as when your neighbor runs a microwave oven.

Jitter can also be caused by ignoring the suggestion during JamKazam installation on a PC to use a "high performance power profile". Specifically, this can be attributed to allowing too low of a 'minimum processor state'. Here is a YouTube video I made about that some years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMi4uwLpPGg

[haydnseek]

Having a similar problem as OP!  My friend and I are connecting through ethernet cables (so we're not on the wifi), we both have Focusrite audio interfaces (sample rates are as close to 44100 as we can get 'em), we're both going through ASIO successfully ... and no matter what we do, we're having severe latency issues.  Any ideas?  

We're also getting Jitter spikes, but I can't figure out what Jitter actually is.  Does Jitter cause lag, too?     Thanks!  

[aiKIDoka]

I have audio and video when connected with my drummer and guitar player. Im in Wa$ngton, they are in California. All lights green except the "internet latency" which is red, and occasional yellows with the jitter. My band mates all have green lights as well with audio gear, and red with internet latency- it's about 30-50 ms. We can all play but the timing is always off. It's like its a beat too slow when I try to jam with either of them. We have gone through all the videos, gone into computer systems and changed power settings, sample rates- all that stuff. It got our audio gear all in the green, but we can't get the internet latency down or fix the timing issue when trying to jam in real time. Direct monitoring is off and on mine, it's a knob that controls "input" and "playback". Mine is all the way on "playback". Audio interfaces are focusrite scarlett 2i2, presonus audiobox usb 96 and the next one up from the usb 96. All work as we can all hear each other and gear test is green. We fix that lag in time and we are jamming! frustrated as all get out because we are so close. Any suggestions?

[tomw39]

I have audio and video when connected with my drummer and guitar player. Im in Wa$ngton, they are in California. All lights green except the "internet latency" which is red, and occasional yellows with the jitter. My band mates all have green lights as well with audio gear, and red with internet latency- it's about 30-50 ms. We can all play but the timing is always off. It's like its a beat too slow when I try to jam with either of them. We have gone through all the videos, gone into computer systems and changed power settings, sample rates- all that stuff. It got our audio gear all in the green, but we can't get the internet latency down or fix the timing issue when trying to jam in real time. Direct monitoring is off and on mine, it's a knob that controls "input" and "playback". Mine is all the way on "playback".  Audio interfaces are focusrite scarlett 2i2, presonus audiobox usb 96 and the next one up from the usb 96. All work as we can all hear each other and gear test is green. We fix that lag in time and we are jamming! frustrated as all get out because we are so close. Any suggestions?

we had same issue last night.  it seems all the local hardware is running well, but still internet latency (and some jitter queue).  i wish i had nabbed a screen shot, but when in a session if I hover over the 'red ball' for someone else in the session you see a large pop-up with a bunch of metrics.  the one that was frequently red was internet latency.  when hovering over that the message said something to the effect of 'jamkazam requires large buffers.....which is adding xxxms of latency'.

interestingly these numbers were different for the two other people in the session.  all three of us are within 3 miles of each other.  some songs were doable, but not very clean sounding.  wondering how our individual internet service is impacting things.

[TProch]

In a similar place as mentioned at the start of this thread. Still a little too much latency to actually play music together. All band member interfaces (Scarlett Solos) running great (all green... 0 - 3ms latency with <0.5ms jitter). Internet latency and jitter running in the 30 to 50ms range with occasional jumps to bigger numbers (90 to 200ms). Total latency is now predominantly the sum of the three internet numbers. We are all close (within 5 miles) and all on the same ISP. We all have 100mbs download/5mbs upload. Called the ISP tech support yesterday. They are definitely experiencing some bottlenecks with the heavy loads that cv19 has caused, and are working to split some nodes to alleviate the pressure...but no dates.  He didn’t think upping our plans to higher upload would help (yet), as the bottlenecks are in the infrastructure, not in our individual service plans. Can’t shove even more data through the same clogged pipe. So we wait.

Last night I was in a session with a guy from NYC (Snake Diamond) who is a JK veteran of four years. He has great success with it with similar latency numbers to ours. His ‘adapt until it gets better’ tip was to have the drummer (only) play faithfully to a click track. Then everyone else follows the drummer. Once you get used to it, the drifting stops because there is a stable timing reference. If the drummer listens too much, he will fall behind and it falls apart. The drummer has the worst listening experience, but everyone else wins. Plan to try this in our next session. Sorry drummers. 😔