If you have played jazz with drums on SonoBus with success, let me know.

[Lawrence Mc Donough]

I am checking into SonoBus. I have had mixed experiences on Jamkazam for our jazz quartet (piano, sax, bass, and drums) playing both classic and modern jazz, sometimes with cracking and often with inadequate latency for drums, all within 20 miles of each other and using audio interfaces, ethernet, and high speed internet. If you have played jazz with drums on SonoBus with success, let me know. Thanks. Larry

[Bud Kroll]

This is a late response to your post, but I have had very high quality experiences on Sonobus for the last few weeks with the new version of the s/w as a jazz drummer playing in trios (haven't tried a quartet yet on SB, only JK).  Much, much better than JK and better than my earlier tries with SB (probably a combination of some great updates by Jesse and my learning curve).  Part of it is that because JK is such an easy place to "pick up" other musicians, you are tempted to play with other musicians who are too far away, and may not have consistently fast internet.  Even with players within 20 miles with fast internet who I know well, JamKazam had rough latency and rough sound quality.  Half the nights it was "good enough", and the other half incredibly non-musical.  I am/was really grateful to have something to play during the pandemic, but it didn't resemble in person.  But for the last 2 weeks since the update Sonobus has been fabulous.  I have had three nights in a row of crystal clear, musical experiences.  Mind blowing.  I can see using Sonobus in tandem with live rehearsing post-pandemic (hoping) to cut down on load in/outs.  I would not say that for JK.  We have also done some recording on Sonobus just for fun, and the results have been crazy good when played on a high quality listening setup.

I am sending 8 channels of drum mics into SB plus a voice mic for talking in between tunes and, occasionally,  two channels from my iPad for previewing unfamiliar tunes from Amazon Music for myself and other players in the session.  The new version of SB now allows me to send those 11 channels directly from my 16 channel DI (Presonus 1824C plus a Digimax D8 ADAT) to SB, and I do the drum submix and EQ there inside SB and send stereo to the other guys.  (Jesse has done a really great job, Kudos to him).

We are all within around 20-25 miles of each other and have between 150/150 for the lowest guy and gigabit (c. 940/940) for several of us.  Our total (up + down) latency between the gigabit players is 19-21ms.  Between the 150 and the gigabit players is around 30ms total (primarily a function of his higher jitter rates from the 150 guy, not the bandwidth itself).  We are using 16bit PCM, sample rate of 48K, Audio Buffer size of 128 samples.  We are still fooling around with jitter buffer settings, it depends on how the network traffic is on a given night.  Sometimes auto is best, sometimes init auto better if jitter is jumping around (and you are willing to suffer an occasional crackle to avoid latency moving around).  Super important to connect by ethernet hard wire, not WiFi, and make sure that there is no mesh system AP that is using wireless backhaul in the chain between your cable and the router (even if you are plugged in, there is still one "hop" over wifi - we had this problem with one of the players, he had to pull a Cat 6 back to the router). 

This is not to say that you don't get any of the "toilet bowl effect" that is so prevalent on JK where the tune is constantly and measurably slowing down and the drummer has to disconnect mentally from what you are hearing in your ears and simply play to your own internal metronome (a real bummer musically).  But the effect has been much less pronounced on SB, at least for us.  That said, ballads work better than up tempo bop, for sure.

Hope this helps.

Bud