Using Jacktrip in conjunction with Zoom

[Starr Wayne]

Hello everyone,

I teach music to students in grades 7-9 at an independent school in Los Angeles and would like to use Jacktrip so that we can play together online in the fall. My school uses Zoom for online teaching. Is there a way to make Jack trip and Zoom work together so that my students and I can play together? 99% of us will be in the same city.

Thank you so much,

Starr

[Michael Dessen]

The question is not getting jacktrip into Zoom (you could just mute Zoom's audio) but getting jacktrip to work at all in that context. For good results at the moment, all your students would need interfaces/mics and ethernet and you'd have to spend a lot of time on tech to get things working, so many people find it's not feasible yet. But if you want to make a real tech project out of it, and everyone has the gear, go for it.

Early in the pandemic when many people were asking about tools for networked music performance, I made some videos with brief answers to common questions about what's possible and what is required. This one and part 2 that follows will give you an overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYRo0R5_qx4&feature=emb_logo

You could also look into Jamulus which might be easier, but you would probably still want to use interfaces/mics and ethernet.

Good luck,

Michael

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[Synthia Cynthia Payne]

I agree with Michael - jackTrip is audio-only. We use zoom for setting
up jackTrip and for the video, and then once everyone is up on jackTrip,
we mute the Zoom audio and just have the video. It doesn't match
perfectly but it's close.

The challenge to this is that each connected location will need a wired
ethernet connection, as jackTrip will connect but does not function well
on WIFI. And jackTrip will run with built-in audio, but external audio
interfaces that plug into USB will offer better sound and control of
dynamics. So, good fast ethernet, external interface, and computer in
each connected location.

And like Michael said, you could make a tech project out of it, as
learning the skills required would transfer well to the everyday world.
I would not count on being able to start playing together right away in
the Fall however. You will need time to set it all up and have small
test sessions first.

I have not tried Jamulus but a lot folks are using it for collaboration,
and it seems to require less technical savvy.

please let us know if you have other questions. happy to help.

synth

[Starr Wayne]

Hi Michael and Synthia,

Thank you so much for your prompt and clear explanations. I understand the difficulties and will present this information to my department and our tech team. It’s a start, who knows! Thanks again.

My best,

Starr


Starr Schaftel Wayne
Harvard-Westlake School
700 North Faring Road
Los Angeles, California 90077
Office: 310-288-3287

> On Jul 23, 2020, at 6:47 PM, Synthia Cynthia Payne <synthi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I agree with Michael - jackTrip is audio-only. We use zoom for setting up jackTrip and for the video, and then once everyone is up on jackTrip, we mute the Zoom audio and just have the video. It doesn't match perfectly but it's close.

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[Andrew Lu]

Hi Starr,

This is a really great question, and as a public school educator myself, I dream of letting my students be able to play together synchronously once again. 

I think there are a few main barriers which are interconnected. As others have mentioned, JackTrip is audio only and requires an Ethernet connection to work well. It's not very user-friendly (far from a plug and play), and takes a lot of setting up. On top of that, from my experience, it works well with Mac, but it lacks support for PCs, and cannot be used with Chromebooks (my district has 1-to-1 Chromebooks).

This comes to the issue of educational equity– getting the hardware out to every student would likely be very difficult. Even if the software was easy to use, all students would need to be guaranteed to have a proper computer, microphone, headphones, internet speeds, and Ethernet set-up in order to make everything work. If one student doesn't have access to that, we have a problem of educational equity. Even where I work– in a relatively affluent middle-class community– there are still some families that lack proper internet connection, and the district worked to provide them WiFI hotspots. Physical tech is really the biggest barrier here, and by far the most expensive, unfortunately. 

Regardless, good luck! If you do manage to experiment and have any success, I'd love to hear about it!

Best,

Andrew

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[Bonnie Kwong]

A note about hardware: mics and headphones are highly recommended but not required.  Without them, there's sometimes high-pitched feedback, an infinite loop between the system mic and speakers, usually located right next to each other on a laptop.  Try turning down the volume on both (on OSX: System Preferences >> Sound >> Output Volume and Input Volume).

Stay tuned for usability improvements.

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[Synthia Cynthia Payne]

Has someone actually tried with a chromebook?
What needs to happen for the chromebook to run jacktrip?
seems like a solution to utilize what Andrew's student have.
synth

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[Synthia Cynthia Payne]

btw: PC support is imminent...
and what a fantastic educational opportunity!
the skills required can be learned and are highly transferable!
plug and play is overrated!

synth

On 7/29/2020 11:46 PM, Bonnie Kwong wrote:

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[Ben Loveridge]

As many mentioned earlier, it's tricky on many technical fronts to get a large group of people all playing together (as if in the same room) over the internet. However, there are ways to go about getting the most out of Zoom in a musical context, I've posted this guide before but hopefully it might provide a few useful tips....https://le.unimelb.edu.au/video-and-media/additional-media-production-services/performing-music-over-the-internet

Cheers,

Ben

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Ben Loveridge
www.benloveridge.com

[Steve C]

I tested wiht a new chromebook the other day... use a chromebook that can run the linux beta vm.... jacktrip and qjackctl ran great, but terrible sound quality to a known good server, as if the chrome os host OS wasnt able to talk to the vm processes fast enough.  Amazingly though, i could set the default audio devices on chromeos, and the qjackctl process in the vm was able to use that selection.  This was a $400 samsung chromebook and I wish I could have tested a higher priced one to see if that affected the audio quality.

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[Andrew Lu]

Steve– Good to know it's technically possible on a Chromebook. Although, getting the school/district to approve of putting Linux on those will probably be a pain if not impossible. We give students cheap Chromebooks with lots of restrictions– I can't imagine district IT letting kids run Linux on those. Even the teacher Macbooks have a bunch of restrictions. I couldn't even install Soundflower without having to go through the district IT.

Synthia– there's a double-edged sword here. Yes, I think there are good skills to be learned here, but plug-and-play is important to me and other educators due to how we want to prioritize our time. And without being able to be there one-on-one to troubleshoot is a pain. I tried troubleshooting JackTrip with my friend over a video call the other day and that was a long struggle. Multiply that by 250 middle schoolers.... I would rather be spending that precious time getting students to record music over Soundtrap, or for me to get more prep/grading done.

Ben– Thanks for the resource. I'll definitely be passing that on to colleagues. In reality, I'm moving away from the performance-centric model of music education for now. Rather than composition supplementing performance, I'm working on a composition-centric model where performance supplements creation. Soundtrap is going to be a huge part of my curriculum come fall. 

I realize I sound like a defeatist here. I just don't think trying to squeeze a traditionally synchronous-dependent study (playing together) into an asynchronous model (distance learning) is a smart prioritization of resources, especially with so many other questions regarding educational equity. That's not to say that we can't try our best in teaching music, or that music performance is dead. I'm super excited for what I have planned for students, and I think they'll get a real kick out of it. It just won't be a band/choir as they've known it. They'll play, they'll compose, and they'll record.

Of course, if someone develops a much more streamlined and easy-to-use version of JackTrip for Chromebooks, let us know! Until then, I will continue to enjoy the wonders of JackTrip in jam sessions between friends. :)

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andr...@gmail.com

[OCH]

https://github.com/omarcostahamido/awesome-networked-media

OCH

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[Bonnie Kwong]

Thank you for patiently laying out the context of your work with children, Andrew.  As a parent of two teenagers, I have much respect for teachers.  Even private school teachers have been working overtime adapting their curriculum to online teaching on short notice, keeping track of their students intellectually, socially and emotionally in the pandemic, while not being able to interact with them face-to-face.  There are teachers who are not in this group because playing music synchronously is way below the priority to educate their students' families that COVID-19 is a real disease, and they need to observe precautions to keep their children safe.  Even with the best efforts and ideals of the open source community, we are not at a stage where installing linux on hundreds of Chromebooks is easy, though we continue to make progress.  This discussion has raised many issues around equity and access to financial and technical resources.  Thank you for understanding Jacktrip started as a research project and is broadening its base among musicians with technical skills.  I hope we can collectively prioritize our efforts as volunteers in the direction of usability and accessibility.

Bonnie

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[Aaron Hayes]

Just checking in on everyone's Chromebook efforts.  A couple things that have transpired for me recently: students within my district were able to buy out their school chromebooks for super cheap or free, so the linux capability could feasibly be activated. With a bit of budget, I can get a group set of usb/ethernet adaptors. If it's feasible to get them running on the Chromebooks, the cost question becomes more reasonable for a 30-40 piece group if it is necessary to buy only a couple RasPi kits. Jamtrip is making Windows look pretty easy now, so the tech/$$ hurdle is getting smaller.   

  I agree there's a time cost/benefit struggle for us teachers, but I've come to appreciate some of the foundational skills that playing with this stuff gives to students. The way I've been thinking about it, even without the pandemic, there are some good skills about network audio that I think the 12-18 year old crowd could bang their head against if we think of it as playing a longer game with music tech.

At the moment, I can get my chromebook to open the qjackctl window with xhost but can't get jack to start properly and am running into the: "could not connect to jack server as client" and "cannot use real-time scheduling" problems....

Steve C's comment about the audio quality also seems like a solvable issue given an ethernet connection, maybe a usb audio interface, and some clarity for us non-tech teachers about how the Linux container engages with the audio on the chromebooks...

Anyway, thanks for any thoughts. Cheers,

Aaron Hayes

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho