What's the Roadmap for JamKazam?

[Sharpie]

So in May the JamKazam co-founders asked for donations to keep JK alive (https://uk.gofundme.com/f/cy2fsq-keep-ja...-improving) - their target has been reached and the donations have kept on coming.  On the GoFundMe page there is an interesting summary of what the money was going to be spent on.  I'd be interested to know what the roadmap is to deliver all these improvements, and what's been done to date - some have arrived (a more stable client) but many haven't yet.  

What's the plan guys?  

The headline areas for spend that are summarised include:

1. Reduce Internet latency;
   
2. Guarantee session connections;
   
3. Provide better support;
   
4. Fix bugs;
   
5. Improve the user interface; and
   
6. Help musicians to generate income.
   

It feels like some work has gone on in areas 4 and 5.  Anything else?  The web site news hasn't been updated since 2014, not much is posted on FaceBook, and updates on these forums seem limited to a very brief description of client updates.  Might be good to engage the users a little more?

[StuartR]

So in May the JamKazam co-founders asked for donations to keep JK alive (https://uk.gofundme.com/f/cy2fsq-keep-ja...-improving) - their target has been reached and the donations have kept on coming.  On the GoFundMe page there is an interesting summary of what the money was going to be spent on.  I'd be interested to know what the roadmap is to deliver all these improvements, and what's been done to date - some have arrived (a more stable client) but many haven't yet.  

What's the plan guys?  

The headline areas for spend that are summarised include:

1. Reduce Internet latency;
   
2. Guarantee session connections;
   
3. Provide better support;
   
4. Fix bugs;
   
5. Improve the user interface; and
   
6. Help musicians to generate income.
   

It feels like some work has gone on in areas 4 and 5.  Anything else?  The web site news hasn't been updated since 2014, not much is posted on FaceBook, and updates on these forums seem limited to a very brief description of client updates.  Might be good to engage the users a little more?

The JK team has sent every registered user three email updates since the Go fund me account creation outlining their plans and updating us on their progress. The latest email was sent out around September 29th.

[mheeley.gm@gmail.com]

So in May the JamKazam co-founders asked for donations to keep JK alive (https://uk.gofundme.com/f/cy2fsq-keep-ja...-improving) - their target has been reached and the donations have kept on coming.  On the GoFundMe page there is an interesting summary of what the money was going to be spent on.  I'd be interested to know what the roadmap is to deliver all these improvements, and what's been done to date - some have arrived (a more stable client) but many haven't yet.  

What's the plan guys?  

The headline areas for spend that are summarised include:

1. Reduce Internet latency;
   
2. Guarantee session connections;
   
3. Provide better support;
   
4. Fix bugs;
   
5. Improve the user interface; and
   
6. Help musicians to generate income.
   

It feels like some work has gone on in areas 4 and 5.  Anything else?  The web site news hasn't been updated since 2014, not much is posted on FaceBook, and updates on these forums seem limited to a very brief description of client updates.  Might be good to engage the users a little more?

The JK team has sent every registered user three email updates since the Go fund me account creation outlining their plans and updating us on their progress. The latest email was sent out around September 29th.

[mheeley.gm@gmail.com]

A great supporter of the JamKazam mission, my Band got on at the beginning of COVID and have had varying degrees of success - US-Germany-NL fun jam sessions but aiming mainly at local folk in the UK getting our practice in ready for virtual or live performances such as we enjoyed to unbelievable levels live in 2019!

I'll crowdfund as soon as income appears again but I notice that performance seems to get better week by week.

This goes hand in hand with us sorting out our end of things 0 the musicians have good to superior broadband and all now have either Windows-Focusrite connectivity or Apple-Behringer.

It would be good to get a progress report generally, either from 'The Top' or savvy forum contributors. There's quite a lot of gain-staging and internal optimisation needed in our experience, so knowing in detail what former problems are being solved would be really useful. For instance, I use an entire hifi amp solely to bring up the level after the Focusrite 2i2 on headphones of the JamKazam Personal Mix to a usable one, having made the gain-staging adjustments in the routing to avoid hum and noise I don't believe I could function without this dedicated extra amplification stage on the way to my listening device. I think the mix recording works OK but the individual tracks are too low level to be usable and anyway what would you do with them?

Pleased to help in any way, I think there's a great basic solution here, and nothing which - after sorting out our personal peculiarities - is preventing us practicing -  which is mission-critical right now!




So in May the JamKazam co-founders asked for donations to keep JK alive (https://uk.gofundme.com/f/cy2fsq-keep-ja...-improving) - their target has been reached and the donations have kept on coming.  On the GoFundMe page there is an interesting summary of what the money was going to be spent on.  I'd be interested to know what the roadmap is to deliver all these improvements, and what's been done to date - some have arrived (a more stable client) but many haven't yet. 


What's the plan guys?  

The headline areas for spend that are summarised include:

1. Reduce Internet latency;
   
2. Guarantee session connections;
   
3. Provide better support;
   
4. Fix bugs;
   
5. Improve the user interface; and
   
6. Help musicians to generate income.
   

It feels like some work has gone on in areas 4 and 5.  Anything else?  The web site news hasn't been updated since 2014, not much is posted on FaceBook, and updates on these forums seem limited to a very brief description of client updates.  Might be good to engage the users a little more?

The JK team has sent every registered user three email updates since the Go fund me account creation outlining their plans and updating us on their progress. The latest email was sent out around September 29th.

[Mike Garrahan]

It feels like some work has gone on in areas 4 and 5.  Anything else?

My evaluation:
1. New submenu Manage > Network Settings > Route, undocumented except for users' educated guesses. Effective but reliability is uncertain.
5. Find Session divided into For Me | Open Jams | Upcoming; session controls reclassified as Audio Inputs | Personal Mix. Other usability problems will take time to remediate.
2. Some advances claimed, some setbacks also evident.
4. Recent releases show some effort, but more improvement is needed to avoid undermining the above.

[StuartR]

It feels like some work has gone on in areas 4 and 5.  Anything else?

My evaluation:
1. New submenu Manage > Network Settings > Route, undocumented except for users' educated guesses. Effective but reliability is uncertain.
5. Find Session divided into For Me | Open Jams | Upcoming; session controls reclassified as Audio Inputs | Personal Mix. Other usability problems will take time to remediate.
2. Some advances claimed, some setbacks also evident.
4. Recent releases show some effort, but more improvement is needed to avoid undermining the above.

More guessing here but from what I'm reading between the lines in their emails, they've improved the connectivity path between our peer-to-peer connections using their network acceleration infrastructure. Perhaps some of the new network route settings in the updated client affect this in different ways but without any documentation it's just unknown.