Happy Holidays from FarPlay!

To celebrate, Distansorkestern band members Johan Eriksson Rapp and Anders Teglund are back with their variation No. 2 on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, performed together live over FarPlay. Johan and Anders were 250 miles (400 km) apart, but FarPlay’s latency is so low that they felt like they were in the same room. Cozy and warm, this recording is perfect for the holiday season.

Our most accessible FarPlay explainer yet

Want to introduce FarPlay to friends? We know it can be challenging to explain what our cutting-edge low-latency audio makes possible to people who haven’t yet experienced it. Our goal in the video below was to present it in a way that even non-musicians could easily understand. At FarPlay, we believe integrity is everything. In that spirit, the actors in the video aren’t pretending: at first, they’re actually trying to sing Happy Birthday over Zoom; then, they’re actually experiencing how easy and natural it is to do it over FarPlay. Enjoy!

Want more examples of what FarPlay can do? Follow us at @farplayapp on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok.

Looking for an easy way to invite people to their first FarPlay session? We’ve made a template to help. Check it out here, and of course, feel free to customize it!

Audio-interface inputs full? Add a talkback mic anyway!

New York City multi-instrumentalist Brittany Anjou wanted to add a talkback mic to help her students hear her speak, but her piano mics already used both inputs on her audio interface. FarPlay’s input mixer saved the day. Watch the highlights below from FarPlay’s last monthly support session.

Our next tech-support session is on Saturday, January 18th, 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time). Sign up here. Monthly tech-support sessions are free for paid subscribers. 

Get in touch

We’ve been loving featuring our amazing users. If you’d like to be included — whether you use FarPlay for lessons, rehearsals, jam sessions, or conversations — we’d love to talk to you. You can let us know by emailing us at contact@farplay.io.

Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide, which you can open from the Help menu in the latest version of FarPlay. If you haven’t already, upgrade free to the latest version.

If you’d like to ask tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. If you need to reach us privately, email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Do musicians really need to use Ethernet?

This question comes up a lot, not just with our ultra-low-latency audio app FarPlay, but also with regular communication apps like Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, etc.

If you’re just having a conversation or taking turns playing in a lesson, you’re not playing together in rhythmic sync, so you don’t need to use Ethernet. You also don’t have to use FarPlay, but there are still great reasons to: even with just Wi-Fi, FarPlay can provide substantially better audio quality and latency than with Zoom. And FarPlay’s full-duplex (simultaneous two-way) audio lets you talk over each other naturally, a relief compared to the frustrating game of “No, no, you go ahead” you might have played in regular video conferences.

It’s worth noting that when Ethernet isn’t required, it’s still preferred, and this goes for both FarPlay and regular meeting apps like Zoom. Compared with Wi-Fi, Ethernet gives you fewer dropouts and less distortion.

If you want to make music together in rhythmic sync (especially tight “pocket playing”), connect your computer and router with an Ethernet cable. And use FarPlay to get the best latency possible over your connection.

Plug one end of your Ethernet cable into your computer or a USB-to-Ethernet adapter (for USB-C or USB-A). Turn Wi-Fi off on your computer. Plug the other end of the Ethernet cable into the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters the home. Usually Ethernet just works. Occasionally, you might need to wait a minute or reboot the router before the router recognizes your computer’s Ethernet connection.

Avoid repeater/extender routers.

And avoid Ethernet-over-Power adapters.

Ethernet cables can be up to 300 feet long without signal degradation. You can roll the cable out just for a session and roll it back up afterward. No need to drill holes and bury an Ethernet cable in walls.

Compared to the time and cost of driving to another musician, spending, say, $10 on a 25-ft Ethernet cable, $15 on a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, and a minute to roll out a cable is a bargain.

If you absolutely can’t use Ethernet (maybe a homeowner doesn’t allow you to run a cord down the hall), you can try the options below, but they tend to be complicated, less reliable, disruptive to housemates, or expensive.

Wired alternatives: Yes to MoCA, no to Powerline

If wiring for cable TV connects rooms in your home, you can connect your computer and router using a pair of MoCA 2.5 adapters. Use one adapter to connect your computer to one end of a TV cable. Use the second adapter to connect your router to another end of a TV cable. Turn Wi-Fi off on your computer.

Your computer and router should now have a wired connection through your home’s TV wiring, but beware.

  • MoCA 2.5 costs more than Ethernet (a pair of MoCA 2.5 adapters costs about $125, compared to about $45 combined for a long 100-ft Ethernet cable and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter).
  • Until you test with a pair of MoCA adapters, you might not know whether TV wiring and splitters hidden in your walls are optimized for MoCA. To see how wiring matters, check out Dong Ngo’s blog post on MoCA.
  • Compared to Ethernet, MoCA adds a little latency (perhaps a few milliseconds).

If you do decide to use MoCA, use MoCA 2.5 adapters, which can transmit data more efficiently than adapters using older MoCA standards (MoCA didn’t support full-duplex transmission until version 2.5).

When you shop for MoCA adapters, Ethernet-over-Power adapters (like “Powerline” adapters) might show up. As mentioned earlier, avoid these.

Ethernet-over-Power adapters use your home’s electrical wiring for the connection, so, yes, like MoCA, Ethernet-over-Power gives your computer and router a wired connection. However, Ethernet-over-Power provides relatively slow speeds and is susceptible to interference from household appliances and problems with household wiring, as explained in Dong’s blog post on Powerline networking. Dong writes that Powerline is “suitable for those needing only a moderately-performing network”, not what we want for playing music in rhythmic sync online.

Optimizing Wi-Fi

Still want to play in rhythmic sync over Wi-Fi? Check out the suggestions below. It’s great if these work for you. If they don’t, remember, Ethernet is still the most reliable and, typically, simplest option.

Reduce Wi-Fi congestion

Try turning Wi-Fi off on other devices in your home. In some cases, turning Wi-Fi off on just your phone and tablet will help a lot, but in other cases, you’ll need to turn Wi-Fi off on all devices in your home other than the computer running FarPlay, and this might not be possible if a housemate uses Wi-Fi to work from home, for example.

If your router provides a 2.4 GHz network and a 5 GHz network, try connecting only the computer running FarPlay to the 5 GHz network. Connect all other devices in your home to the 2.4 GHz network.

This method has drawbacks. You might degrade Wi-Fi connections for other devices in your home. If your router doesn’t already provide two separate networks, you’ll need to log into your router settings, make sure Self-Organizing Network (SON) is off, and create two SSIDs.

Upgrade to Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7

You can upgrade your router and computer to Wi-Fi 6, 6E or, even better, 7. These newer standards do a better job of providing low latency in congested Wi-Fi networks. It’s worth noting that better doesn’t mean perfect. I recently tech-supported a user who uses a Wi-Fi 6 router. Indeed, their latency over Wi-Fi was stable most of the time, but I’d occasionally see their latency jump. In rehearsals, such latency jumps can randomly interrupt a groove — annoying!

Even with Wi-Fi 6 or higher, you might still need to turn Wi-Fi off for other devices in the home, or you might still need to create a dedicated SSID for the computer running FarPlay.

And even if you use all our suggestions for improving your Wi-Fi connection, your connection could still be degraded by interference, from devices outside your home, for example. Bottom line, if you want the connection to “just work”, follow the advice in FarPlay’s QuickStart guide: use Ethernet.

Why does Wi-Fi make it harder to play in sync online?

The problem isn’t just weak signals. Even when your computer and router are next to each other and signals are strong, Wi-Fi can produce high and unstable latency. Why? Congestion. Especially with older standards, when multiple household devices (computers, smartphones, tablets, etc.) try to communicate at the same time, you get a Wi-Fi-traffic jam. Your computer ends up waiting its turn to communicate with the router. If you use a wireless repeater router, communication between the repeater router and main router can be delayed by traffic jams too. Such delays are fine when loading a web page, but can make it impossible to play together in rhythmic sync online. Every suggestion we’ve provided helps you avoid congestion delays by avoiding Wi-Fi, reducing congestion on your Wi-Fi network, or upgrading to newer Wi-Fi standards that handle congestion better.

—David Liao

Turn off Apple Reactions in video chats on your Mac

Does your Mac add animated reactions to video chats in FarPlay, FaceTime, Skype, etc.? Maybe a thumbs-up emoji appears when you make a thumbs-up sign, or maybe you see other animations like fireworks or balloons. In online music lessons or work meetings, these animations can be annoying.

Get rid of them by turning off video reactions. Watch the video below to see how. Works for regular communication apps like FaceTime and Skype, as well as our ultra-low-latency audio app FarPlay.

  • Start video in a communication app. In FaceTime, video starts when you open the app. In Skype, go to Settings > Audio & Video. In FarPlay, start a video chat (could be with just yourself).
  • Click the green camera icon at the top of the screen.
  • Click the green Reactions icon.
  • Repeat the steps above for other apps in which unwanted Apple Reactions appear.

That’s it. No more unwanted Apple Reactions!

—David

4000 miles won’t stop this Lied duo

Making music together near and far

Mezzo-soprano Valerie Eickhoff, Winner of the 2024 Opus Klassik New Talent of the Year award, and pianist Elenora Pertz rehearse live between New York City and Dresden, 4000 miles apart. They had about 55ms of latency at this distance, and still were able to rehearse beautifully in this style of music. Here they perform Clara Schumann’s German art song — or “Lied” — “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen”. Btw, that lovely reverb you hear on Valerie’s voice is our new built-in reverb, introduced in FarPlay 1.3 (free download here).

Ahead of their duo gig at Mezzrow Jazz Club, Dayna Stephens and our very own Dan Tepfer rehearsed live over the internet using FarPlay. They had 15ms of latency between Brooklyn and New Jersey, equivalent to playing with someone 15ft away from you in a room. This is Dayna’s beautiful tune “Radio-Active Earworm”.

Garbled audio? Echo? Let’s fix that.

Sometimes changing a setting outside of FarPlay fixes audio for our ultra-low-latency audio app FarPlay and regular communications apps like Zoom at the same time. We’ve recently shared two examples.

Do you have a voice student who sounds distorted when they sing online using their Windows PC? Maybe their audio is garbled and their high notes cut out. Fix the problem by turning off signal processing using the video below and this blog post.

Do other people in your calls complain about an echo of themselves when you join with your USB mixer? We explained the fix at FarPlay’s monthly support session Saturday October 26th, 2024. Visit our blog post for details.

Podcast invitation: Accelerate pop vocal coaching with FarPlay

“Radical” Vocal Coach Brad Chapman has worked with platinum artists including Anita Baker, REO Speedwagon, and Whitesnake. Why does Brad teach his students to monitor their singing in headphones in FarPlay? And why do his students use FarPlay with a DAW? To learn why FarPlay is Brad’s secret weapon for getting students studio-ready, join the audience for Brad’s free podcast on Saturday December 7th 11:30am Los Angeles time (2:30pm New York time). Sign up here.

Get in touch

We’ve been loving featuring our amazing users. If you’d like to be included — whether you use FarPlay for lessons, rehearsals, jam sessions, or conversations — we’d love to talk to you. You can let us know by emailing us at contact@farplay.io.

Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide, which you can open from the Help menu in the latest version of FarPlay. If you haven’t already, upgrade free to the latest version.

If you’d like to ask tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. If you need to reach us privately, email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!

We hope you’ve been enjoying FarPlay 1.3!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Fix distorted audio in Windows

Does your voice sound distorted to others when you sing in voice lessons online using your Windows PC? Maybe you sound muffled or garbled, or maybe other people can’t hear you sing high notes.

Fix the problem by turning off signal processing using the steps below. This should make your voice sound clear in our ultra-low-latency audio app FarPlay, as well as in regular communication apps like Zoom or WebEx.

  • Go to Start > Settings > System > Sound. In Windows 11, click More Sound Settings. In Windows 10, click Sound Control Panel.
  • Go to the Recording tab. Double-click the microphone you want to use. Go to the Advanced tab.
  • Make sure Enable audio enhancements or Enable sound effects is unchecked. Some PCs have an Enhancements tab with a checkbox labeled Disable all enhancements. If so, check that checkbox. Press OK twice.

These steps typically fix the problem on Windows PCs. If audio remains distorted after using the steps above, try turning off signal enhancements in settings apps from your PC’s manufacturer. For Dell and Lenovo PCs, try the suggestions below.

Additional steps for Dell PCs

Go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound. Open Dell Audio. In the Main tab, make sure all the switches under Maxx Audio (bottom half of page) are set to OFF. Some Dell PCs forget your settings after you close Dell Audio. If this is the case, try leaving the Dell Audio app running to prevent the switches from flipping back to ON.

Additional steps for Lenovo PCs

Apply the settings below in Lenovo Vantage (some settings might not be available on your PC).

Why does this problem happen?

A lot of Windows PCs try to modify microphone audio to reduce noise or echo. This signal processing is usually designed for speech. This might make sense when someone is on a voice call in a noisy café, but the signal processing often makes your voice sound muffled or garbled (even silencing high notes) and makes your PC do unnecessary processing. So when singing or playing online, turn off signal enhancements on your Windows PC.

—David

Get rid of echo from your USB mixer

You just brought home a new USB mixer, and you can’t wait to impress your friends with it in an online jam session on FarPlay or in a conference call on Zoom, Skype, or FaceTime. You really do sound great to them, but they complain they hear an echo of themselves, and they track the problem down: it’s you. That’s weird. Sure, echo often happens when someone uses speakers instead of headphones, but you confirmed that you’re hearing the other participants through your headphones; their audio isn’t coming out of your speakers.

Is there a way to get rid of this echo? Why is this happening?

The fix is easy. There’s typically a button on the USB mixer you push to make the mixer stop sending a copy of the audio from the computer back into the computer. The name of the button varies between mixers. At FarPlay’s support session on Saturday October 26th, 2024, I showed attendees where the button was on the Mackie ProFX6v3. Check out the video below.

The steps are similar for common USB mixers:

  • Mackie ProFX6v3: Make sure the USB 3-4 button is OFF (not pushed in). Make sure the TO PHONES button is pushed in. Set the BLEND halfway between INPUTS and USB 1-2 (or to USB 1-2). Don’t set the BLEND to INPUTS. For more information, see the ProFX6v3’s manual.
  • Yamaha AG03/06 and AG03/AG06 Mk2: Set the TO PC switch to INPUT MIX, not LOOPBACK. Gradually raise the USB/computer level knob as needed to hear audio from the computer in your headphones. For more information, see Yamaha’s manuals for their AG03/06 mixers or their AG03/06 Mk2 mixers.
  • Alesis MultiMix 8 USB FX: Make sure the 2 TRK/USB TO MAIN button is not pushed in. Make sure the 2 TRK/USB TO MONITOR button is pushed in. For more information, see the MultiMix 8 USB FX’s manual.

Looking for the button on a different mixer? Search your mixer’s manual for keywords like livestreaming, webcasting, gaming, and loopback. Sending the audio from the computer back into the computer is called loopback. Livestreamers use loopback to let their audiences hear a mix of game audio, for example, with their voice, but loopback creates an echo in online conversations and jam sessions. In short, turn loopback off for sessions on FarPlay, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, etc.

—David

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Jam Together From Afar

We’re hard at work on the next version of FarPlay. If you haven’t already, upgrade free to the latest version.

A little housekeeping: Shortly after Apple released macOS Sequoia 15.0, reports of issues with different firewall and network software began popping up. If you’re running into networking issues on Sequoia, go to your Mac’s Local Network settings and flick the switch to give FarPlay permission, as shown on our forum.

What’s packet re-requesting, and what does it have to do with recording?

Musician, composer, and FarPlay co-founder Dan Tepfer talks about packet re-requesting, a powerful new feature in FarPlay 1.3 that helps you make pristine recordings over a wider range of connections. Read the transcript on our blog.

Variations on Twinkle Twinkle: No. 1

Speaking of pristine recordings, Johan Eriksson Rapp and Anders Teglund return to our newsletter with the first of a series of variations on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. They recorded the audio and video for this studio-quality single live in FarPlay, not separately, giving them the opportunity to relate organically in real-time. Listen to the stellar single on SpotifyApple Music, and Amazon Music, or watch the video below.

Distansorkestern (“Distance Orchestra”) band members Johan and Anders are Swedish composers who use FarPlay to rehearse and record live from Falun and Kungsbacka, Sweden, 250 miles (400 km) apart.

Happy birthday, FarPlay monthly support sessions!

Thank you to our community for a wonderful year of FarPlay monthly support sessions. It’s been so much fun to help and meet you.

Songwriter/producer Maat Hotep came to our session on September 14th, 2024 to find out what it takes to get started with FarPlay. Watch highlights below and visit our QuickStart guide.

Sign up for our support session on Saturday October 26th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time). Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers. 

Get in touch

Do you love FarPlay and have experience with marketing? Would you be interested in helping us with our mission of making low-latency audio available to everyone by helping us spread the word? If so, email us at contact@farplay.io.

We’ve been loving featuring our amazing users. If you’d like to be included — whether you use FarPlay for lessons, rehearsals, jam sessions, or conversations — we’d love to talk to you. You can let us know by emailing us at contact@farplay.io.

Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide.

If you’d like to ask tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. If you need to reach us privately, email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!

We hope you’ve been enjoying FarPlay 1.3!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Pristine recordings over a wider range of connections thanks to packet re-requesting in FarPlay 1.3

Musician, composer, and FarPlay co-founder Dan Tepfer talks about packet re-requesting, a powerful new feature in FarPlay 1.3.

Read the transcript

Hi, I’m Dan Tepfer. I’m co-founder of FarPlay with Anton Runov. I’m also a musician and composer. I actually use FarPlay all the time in my music, and I want to talk to you about a feature that we’re introducing in FarPlay 1.3 that I’m super excited about. It’s an under-the-hood-type feature. And so I want to take the time to explain it because it’s so important.

So this feature is called “Packet Re-Requesting.”

FarPlay is amazing at minimizing the latency, the amount of time between when you make a sound and your partner or your friend hears it through the internet. And this presents a lot of challenges. The way audio data is sent through the internet is in little chunks, and these chunks are called “packets.” So you’re over here and you’re sending this constant stream of packets over to your friend. And since we’re trying to minimize latency as much as possible, you might think that as soon as you receive a packet over here, we would want to play it right away into the headphones of your friend. But if you did that, you’d run into a really big problem, which is that the internet is a complicated place. Conditions change all the time. There’s congestion, and the amount of time that it takes for a packet to get from you to your friend can vary, and that’s called “jitter.” So, to compensate for that on the receiving end, we introduce what’s called a “buffer,” and that’s just a little bit of a waiting period before you play packets that have arrived. And the purpose of that is that, thanks to that little waiting period, once you finish playing that first packet, it’s very likely that the second packet will have already arrived. And so you can play an unbroken stream of audio.

Now, FarPlay is super powerful in that we give you complete control over the length of that buffer. That’s what changing the latency slider does. And so you can choose to make that buffer super, super short and to play packets almost as they arrive. And as a tradeoff, you’re probably going to hear some static in your headphones. They’re going to be some packets that won’t have arrived yet, and that’s just something you control. You can control it however you want.

And that’s all well and good for playing music, but one of the great things that FarPlay does is it makes recordings. You know, we can make studio-quality recordings with separate stems. And so in that recording, you can’t tolerate static, right? You need really clean audio. And so what we do is, instead of using that super-short buffer that you’re using for your own monitoring, we have a separate really long buffer that we use for the recording. And so the hope is that that buffer is so long that by the time the recording is made, all the packets will have arrived, even the very delayed ones, because of the jitter.

But, actually, you run into a problem with that approach. And that problem is that some packets on the internet, for complicated reasons, simply never arrive. It’s like the mail. You send a letter; there’s always a chance that it will never arrive. And so they just are gone. You’ll never get them. And so what’s the solution to that?

Well, in FarPlay, 1.3, we implemented the system that re-requests packets. So on the receiving end, if a packet hasn’t arrived by a certain time, we send a message to the sending end saying, “Hey, we never got that packet. Could you send it again?” And so it gets sent again, and then it gets slotted into the recording at exactly the right spot. And what we have now with FarPlay 1.3 is that even under challenging network conditions, you can guarantee, within limits, but, basically, for most connections, you can absolutely guarantee a pristine studio-quality recording. And I’m super excited that we’ve finally implemented this. This is something we’ve been wanting to implement for a long time, and hope you find it as useful as I do.

A bug in macOS Sequoia 15.0’s firewall could have been disastrous for FarPlay. But we found a way to keep the music going.

When we got the first report that FarPlay app failed to connect after upgrading to Sequoia 15.0, we checked the logs and found that most users who upgraded hadn’t experienced issues, so we thought it might be a one-off case. But after receiving several more complaints it became clear: we had a problem.

FarPlay is an app that allows musicians to make music online interactively. This requires much lower latency than common audio/video conferencing apps provide. To make online jamming feel like you’re in the same room, end-to-end latency needs to be below 20-30ms. That’s why FarPlay relies exclusively on peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. It allows us to use the shortest and the fastest possible path to deliver audio data from one side to another. But P2P connectivity depends strongly on firewall behavior. Firewalls that are too restrictive or incorrectly configured can easily make P2P connections impossible.

Shortly after Apple released macOS Sequoia 15.0, reports of issues with different firewall and network software began popping up. Customers of large security software companies like CrowdStrike, ESET, and SentinelOne reported issues. Some VPNs stopped working too. For some FarPlay users, it looked as though their firewalls just started blocking audio traffic entirely even when their firewalls were turned off completely in system settings. At the same time, others didn’t experience any issues. I was not able to reproduce the problem on my test Mac.

We are a very small company, just a few people. If IT security giants couldn’t solve the issue, what could we do? About 60% of our users are on Mac, and even if only 10% were affected, it could have been disastrous for us. When P2P connectivity is broken, FarPlay simply can’t work. A music teacher can’t provide a scheduled lesson. Musicians can’t conduct their final rehearsal before a concert.

We began researching the changes in the new version of macOS and discovered that the new “Local Network” section in the “Privacy & Security” settings affects FarPlay connectivity. This setting has existed in iOS for a while and has now been added to macOS. Normally, it would only be required for connecting FarPlay clients within the same local network. However, we found that enabling this setting for the FarPlay app also resolved the connectivity issues for users affected by the Sequoia firewall problem.

So, if you have a networking issue with Sequoia, check out the Local Network section of Privacy & Security settings. I can’t say if this helps with other Sequoia issues, but it was a lifesaver for us. Shortly after we published this workaround on our support forum, other users confirmed that it worked for them as well.

Just recently, Apple released Sequoia bugfix version 15.0.1. As usual, its description is vague, it says it “improves compatibility with third-party security software”. We don’t have enough data yet to say if our problem was fixed with this update. Our users already had a solution at that point.

—Anton

FarPlay 1.3: Use audio from multiple devices at the same time, and more

Many thanks to everyone who enthusiastically tested FarPlay 1.3 beta. Team work pays off, and we’re thrilled to release FarPlay 1.3. This major update makes it easy to use multiple audio input devices at the same time, add reverb to individual tracks in the mixer, and make pristine recordings over a wider range of network connections thanks to built-in error correction. Version 1.3 also comes with design improvements that make it more convenient to access important features.

Upgrade here (FarPlay upgrades are always free).

Bring audio from multiple sources into FarPlay at the same time

FarPlay 1.3’s upgraded mixer, available to all users, lets you mix audio from multiple audio input devices. This makes it easy to bring in background music from another app, play on an instrument connected to an audio interface, and talk through a separate mic, all at the same time.

Simply use the Input pull-down menu for a track to select the device you want that track to use.

For step-by-step instructions, including how to send system audio on Mac and Windows to the input mixer, see our updated mixer instructions.

Reverb

FarPlay’s upgraded mixer also introduces ultra-low-latency reverb you can adjust on a track-by-track basis. Click the FX button for a track. Check the FarPlay Reverb checkbox and drag the slider to adjust the amount of reverb for the track. That’s it!

Pristine recordings over a wider range of network connections

FarPlay has been great for professional remote audio production and is even better at it now.

Since version 0.3.5, FarPlay’s recording feature has used a large buffer delay to produce high-quality recordings, even for network connections with unstable latencies. With version 1.3, we’re introducing a new packet re-requesting system to provide pristine recordings over an even wider range of network connections.

Learn more about these error-correction technologies here.

Improved design means more convenience

Subscribers can create a Persistent Meeting room by clicking the New Session button or through the Session menu. Either way, there’s no need to leave the app.

And, Broadcast Output is now easier to find and more intuitive to use with its own window and menu item.

These are just some examples of how we’ve made it easier to access important FarPlay features. For more information, visit our new accessibility page, which explains how to use FarPlay with a screen reader and keyboard navigation (including keyboard shortcuts).

Next monthly support session

Want to see how to send system audio into FarPlay? Watch the highlights from our July session below, or better yet, join us for the next one!

Sign up for our support session on Saturday August 24th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time). Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers. 

Get in touch

We’ve been loving featuring our amazing users. If you’d like to be included — whether you use FarPlay for lessons, rehearsals, jam sessions, or conversations — we’d love to talk to you. You can let us know by emailing us at contact@farplay.io.

Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide.

If you’d like to ask tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. If you need to reach us privately, email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!

We hope you enjoy FarPlay 1.3!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team