[robhack]

Yeah, I don't see how it could be done.. unless all the players got optic fiber or something, and even so I'm not sure. I would be very interested in a collaborative sequencer though. Let's say drummer record a first loop, then everyone can hear it, guitarist plays a chord progression over it and record it, then the singer can add his part. The drummer then decides to add a special part at some place to go together with the singer and he edits his sequence so it's not 100% loop anymore, etc etc...

[bradleyland]

Fiber has great throughput, but doesn't guarantee lower latency. Distance, number of hops, and contention (for shared infrastructure transport) are more relevant when it comes to latency, and these are much, much more difficult to overcome than throughput challenges.

There are other solutions, however. Just have a look at any FPS (first person shooter) game. These types of games are extremely latency sensitive, because a win/loss in any direct engagement comes down to milliseconds. There are entire areas of study dedicated to working around latency in games. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the techniques could be applied to this type of real-time collaboration.

[puetzk]

Yes, but music is even harder. I doubt most FPS shooters would suffer much at 60ms latency, but that's an 1/8 note at 120bpm. I would guess that for a jam session to feel OK, you'd want to be <15ms.

Musical tracking has to take special measures to keep the latency low enough even when its all local; see the need for ASIO, jackd, etc.

[laurentoget]

<pedantic> 120 bpm is 120 quarter note per minute, so a 8th note is 500ms, a 16th note is 250ms, a 32th 125ms. </pedantic> that said having played with a midi controller on badly configured linux machines i agree 15ms would start to be an issue.