Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Comments
For example, starting here the singer in Kiev (who is awesome, btw) is singing the song and is in perfect time with the band.
(if the link doesn't work, go to @t=2066s or 34:26).
Given the latency of the internet or any long distance communication, I'm really confused how they did this live.
Easy. As long as the latency is constant, which isn't hard to arrange, the singer would just sing to what they heard. The broadcast would include the delayed orchestral content plus the live singer content. As long as the orchestra doesn't need to hear the singer, there's no issue.
Of course, no latency really needed to be there at all. The orchestra and singer don't need to communicate over the internet. Its only the live stream that needs to involve the internet and its latency. They probably just heard a real old-school radio communication.
Distance between Kiev and Moscow is only about 700 km... the speed of light (and thus internet data, as it's mostly transmitted over terrestrial radio links over medium distances, which travel at the speed of light) is 300,000 km per second, so apart from processing delays in the routers and encoding / decoding lag (which is minimal), it shouldn't take much longer than 0.0023 seconds (2.3 milliseconds).
I guess the buffering, encoding / decoding and processing delays in the routers are actually more significant than the light travel delay.
Given enough internet BANDWIDTH, the necessary buffering should be minimal too so... no technical obstacles to such a performance really 🙂
(it would be a different story if one band member was in Sydney and the other in London 😉)
@wim has a less technical viewpoint 🥳 (I didn't even watch the video)
Thanks for the explanation guys. With all the latency I experience playing video games it seemed amazing to collaborate on any kind of musical endeavor over the Internet. But I guess with enough bandwidth and dedicated technology anything is possible!
No amazing technology needed. As long as the orchestra doesn't need to hear the singer, the singer can sing along whenever they hear it. You're assuming a two-way communication, but it doesn't need to be.
Not exactly the speed of light (my mom is a physics teacher, and that would be the speed in vacuum, she wanted me to tell you that).
But yes, delay the transmission to everyone, to account for latency
Haha, love that! Greetings to your mom.
Yes there's of course other factors too, like there isn't a radio link exactly between the venue and the singer, but it'll go through the geographically nearest "hops" so it won't be a straight line, etc...
But in general, even if this event wasn't intended to be fully "live" from what @wim said -- there would really be no technically insurmountable hurdle to actually doing it fully live. A very high bandwidth would still be desirable for reliability, or if live video is involved.