There was a brief foray into Jamulus during last night’s zynth club. It took a bit of effort to get things working. Three participants used desktop versions of Jamulus and I ran the Zynthian version on a Raspberry Pi 3 Zynthian 3. The server was in London with one participant local to the server. I am in Clacton 80 miles from there. Another is in Manchester 200 miles from London and the other in USA. It kinda worked. The USA machine had an audio routing issue which resulted in USA hearing ourselves and not him. This have a distracting slapback delay effect. Without that link we found that a rhythm produced in London and played against in Manchester was poorly synchronised in London and Clacton. The audio had to travel to Manchester and Clacton. The accompanying piano was playing against the audio that was arriving in Manchester about 90ms late then being sent to London and on to Clacton. So I would have heard the piano much later than the drums. This made it difficult to comprehend and I could not play along.
There were many xruns on the Zynthian but that isn’t unusual with the configuration I was using. The audio quality varied between pretty good (acceptable) to garbled.
Communication was awkward we used Jitsi as an out of bound comms channel but Jamulus takes over PC sound (on Windows at least) so that failed.
Muting your own feed helped because it removed slapback of yourself. This is not currently possible in Zynthian because there is no control of headless Jamulus.
This was a promising start with some frustration. Zynthian really needs some control of a running Jamulus instance. I wouldn’t want to use it for a proper music session.