FarPlay Blog

It’s been so fun meeting impromptu with other musicians on FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of musicians who use FarPlay. Thanks to all of our users who’ve helped us test FarPlay Meet so far. Meet remains in invitation-only testing for a little while longer. To sign up for the waitlist, reply here!

Oteil Burbridge and Roots Rock Revival jam coast-to-coast

Two-time Grammy-winning bassist Oteil Burbridge played in Dead & Company’s concerts in San Francisco this month to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead, but that didn’t stop him from jamming and teaching at the “Roots Rock Revival” camp in upstate New York, 2900 miles away.

Retreat to Music is a nonprofit that was part of the team that made the magic happen. Here’s what they had to say:

“A very sincere, personal shoutout and THANK YOU to our friends at @farplayapp – this app, paired with their TOP DRAWER tech support, made this concept a reality. We are so grateful for the insight and passion you put into making a real-time communication platform that is accessible to everyone.”

Stop instruments from cutting out

Does the sound from instruments cut out even though speech sounds clear? We previously explained how to fix this on PCs by turning Windows Signal Enhancements off. On Macs, set the Mic Mode to Standard, as attendees at our monthly support session Saturday, July 19th, 2025 found out. Learn more at our blog.

Interested in live tech support? Signups are still open for this month’s support session today, Saturday, August 23rd 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Our following session will be Saturday, September 13th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers 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

Does the sound from instruments cut out even though speech sounds clear? We previously explained how to fix this on PCs by turning Windows Signal Enhancements off. On Macs, set the Mic Mode to Standard, as attendees at our monthly support session Saturday, July 19th, 2025 learned.

On macOS 14 Sonoma or macOS 15 Sequoia

Open a session in FarPlay. Click the orange microphone , green camera , or purple screen-sharing icon in the menu bar. Check that you’re looking at the settings for FarPlay (settings for other apps might be available). Make sure the Mic Mode is set to Standard.

On macOS 12 Monterey or macOS 13 Ventura

Open a session in FarPlay. Click the Control Center icon in the menu bar. Click Mic Mode.

Under Mic Mode, make sure FarPlay is set to Standard.

On older Macs

Older Macs don’t have a Voice Isolation setting to disable, but you should still turn noise reduction off to maximize audio quality and minimize latency. Open System Preferences > Sound. Click the Input tab.

Click to highlight the microphone you want to use from the list of microphones.

Near the bottom of the microphone settings, make sure “Use ambient noise reduction” is unchecked.

Why does this problem happen?

The Voice Isolation Mic Mode on newer Macs and ambient noise reduction on older Macs filter out background noise. This is great for conversations in noisy environments. However, filtering out non-speech sounds is undesirable when trying to play instruments, so be sure to turn noise reduction off when making music over FarPlay.

—David

We’re getting ready to share some exciting news about FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of musicians who use FarPlay. Thanks to all of our users who’ve helped us test FarPlay Meet so far. Meet remains in invitation-only testing. To join the waitlist, reply to this newsletter!

Over 1000 miles, as the “Songbird” flies

So cool to see vocal coach Stephannie Moore, in Florida, sharing this clip from a lesson with Lily, in Connecticut — over 1,000 miles apart! Thanks to the real-time accompaniment and immediate feedback made possible by FarPlay, they’re able to workshop Fleetwood Mac’s “Songbird” just as effectively as if they were in the same room.

Dr. Stephannie Moore ⁨works with students across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia. She’s also a clinical researcher who specializes in preventing and rehabilitating singing voice injuries. Lily Farrell is a theatre major at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Turn VPN off to fix blurry video and high latency

Getting murky video? Unusually high latency? Make sure everyone uses an Ethernet cable to connect their computer to the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters the home. Avoid wireless repeater/extender routers and Ethernet-over-power adapters. Ask everyone to turn their computer’s Wi-Fi off. If that doesn’t fix the problem, have everyone turn VPN off, as attendees found out at our June support session. Learn more at our blog.

Interested in live tech support? Signups are still open for this month’s support session on Saturday, July 19th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Our following session will be Saturday, August 23rd 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers 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

Getting murky or blocky video? Is latency unusually high? Make sure everyone uses an Ethernet cable to connect their computer to the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters the home. Avoid wireless repeater/extender routers and Ethernet-over-power adapters. Ask everyone to turn their computer’s Wi-Fi off. If that doesn’t fix the problem, have everyone turn VPN off, as attendees of our monthly support session Sunday, June 29th, 2025 found out.

Turning VPN off just takes a few clicks:

• In macOS Ventura and later, click the Apple menu, then System Settings. In the sidebar at the left, click VPN. If there’s any VPN that is “Connected”, flick its switch to the off position.
• In macOS Monterey and earlier, click the Apple menu, then System Preferences. Go to Network. If the list of network services at the left shows that any VPN is “Connected”, click on that VPN and click its Disconnect button.
• On Windows PCs, click Start > Settings > Network & Internet > VPN. Look through the list of VPNs on the right. If you find a VPN listed as “Connected”, click its Disconnect button.
• If you’ve installed separate VPN or security software, look for the software’s icon in the menu bar at the top of the screen on a Mac or in the System Tray at the bottom of the screen on a Windows PC. Click the application’s icon to look for its VPN-off switch.

—David

We’re thrilled to say hello to so many new subscribers! Looking for users to try FarPlay with? We think you’ll love FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. Meet remains in invitation-only testing. To join the waitlist, reply to this newsletter!

The Gomalan Brass Quintet rehearses on FarPlay!

Here, for the first time, all five brass players rehearse together in real time from the Italian cities of Genoa, Turin, Parma, and Reggio Emilia, across 150 miles! They’re performing a stirring rendition of the Triumphal March from Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, a fitting way to announce their arrival on FarPlay. Bravi!

Spice things up with backing tracks

Your student on FarPlay can play along with a backing track on YouTube on your computer! Simply bring system audio into your FarPlay session with our Input Mixer. See how violin teacher Laurel Thomsen got set up in minutes in the video highlight below from our May support session.

Interested in live tech support? Signups are still open for this month’s support session on Sunday, June 29th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Our following session will be Saturday, July 19th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers 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

It’s been great to see so many of you on FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. Meet remains in invitation-only testing. Interested in joining the waitlist? Reply to this newsletter to let us know!

Feel the Groove with Mango Mindset

We’re excited to have Johann Hagerer, Cataldo Mocciaro, and Holger Rauhut return to our newsletter. Here, their band, Mango Mindset, is performing Holger’s cool “Seven Days of Snow”, with lyrics from Syd Barrett’s “Effervescing Elephant”, live over FarPlay from two separate locations in Munich. The song’s complex 7/4 time signature was no problem, thanks to FarPlay’s rock-bottom latency.

Easily transfer pan and gain settings to another computer

You’ve adjusted pan and gain settings for your ensemble just the way you like, but now you want to install FarPlay on another computer. Does this mean adjusting pan and gain settings for your ensemble all over again? No. FarPlay lets you save and load files containing pan and gain settings. To use these options, click the Session menu and open the Multi-User Session Options submenu, as described in the video below and our multi-user session instructions.

This video is just one of the highlights from our recent monthly support sessions. You’re invited to join one of our monthly sessions below.

• Saturday, May 31st 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time
• Sunday, June 29th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time

Signups are still open for the session on May 31st. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers 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 bustling 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

We’ve been working hard on our next release and testing our upcoming FarPlay Meet platform, which will allow you to connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. Meet is in invitation-only testing. Interested? Reply to this newsletter to join the waitlist to test Meet!

Easy fix: FarPlay 1.3.1 crashes on Windows (rare)

FarPlay crashed for a small number of Windows users after upgrading to version 1.3.1. If FarPlay 1.3.1 crashes on your Windows PC, simply download and run this installer from Microsoft to update components of Windows FarPlay requires. Thanks to everyone who reported the problem and tested the fix!

Venus Leone & Diego Morales perform together over FarPlay

Performing artist, multi-lingual accent coach, and sound engineer Venus Leone sang from Los Angeles, and guitarist, composer, and producer Diego Morales played guitar and his instrumental track from Zurich, Switzerland. When they performed her sultry song Besame together over FarPlay, Venus felt “like he was playing in the other room!” Besame is Venus’s entry for this year’s NPR Tiny Desk Contest. We hope you make it to Tiny Desk!

Getting started with FarPlay

Want to show a student or band member how to get started with FarPlay? Send them this six-minute video, which walks them through the simplest setup we’ve found.

The simplest way to make music together with FarPlay is to plug wired headphones with a mic (like wired Apple EarPods) into your computer and to use an Ethernet cable to connect your computer to the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters your home. If your computer doesn’t have an Ethernet port, use an Ethernet adapter for USB-C or USB-A. Sharing these recommendations is easy with our personalizable template.

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!

You can also get support at our monthly support sessions. Our next monthly support session is Wednesday, April 30th 12:00pm-1:30pm New York time (6:00pm-7:30pm Central European time). Sign up here. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers subscribers.

We hope you’ve been enjoying FarPlay 1.3.1!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Dear FarPlay Community,

We want to extend our sincerest apologies for the service interruption that occurred yesterday. We understand how disruptive and frustrating downtime can be—including for those of you who rely on FarPlay to teach and perform music professionally.

The outage affected the FarPlay app, website, and email and was due to an error at one of our service providers. Service was restored at 8pm New York time. 

Thanks to everyone for your patience while we fixed this issue. Making sure that FarPlay always provides an open avenue of communication is our top priority, and we’re working to make sure this never happens again.

We know many of our subscribers rely on FarPlay for their professions. For those of you impacted, please reach out to us via support@farplay.io, and we’ll arrange appropriate credits.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to our support team. 

Sincerely,
David Liao & the FarPlay team

Thanks to your feedback, FarPlay 1.3.1, out now, introduces accessibility and usability improvements including audible entrance/departure notifications, the option to show/hide messages from previous chats, and more. FarPlay now automatically reconnects after interruptions to network connectivity. We also fixed a bug that prevented FarPlay from saving changes to the number of channels you send. Upgrade for free here.

One more thing: this release also adds support for our upcoming FarPlay Meet platform, which will allow you to connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. For now, we will be granting access to Meet on an invitation-only basis, but we’re very excited to bring this to the community at large soon. Stay tuned!

Hide messages from previous chats

Since its introduction with FarPlay 1.1, the Chat window has displayed messages from the current session and previous sessions — great for reviewing rehearsal notes. With version 1.3.1, you can now hide messages from previous sessions. Simply uncheck “Show messages from previous sessions” in the Chat window. Learn more about chat in our Tips and Tricks.

Audible notifications for entrances and departures

Starting with version 1.3.1, FarPlay can play audible notifications when someone joins or leaves a session. To turn audible notifications on/off and adjust their volume, go to the Advanced tab in the Preferences window. For details, visit our accessibility page.

Mute yourself using the keyboard

Muting and unmuting yourself is even easier. You can still click the mute button, but now, you can also press Option-Command-M on Macs or Control+Alt+M in Windows. For a list of FarPlay’s keyboard shortcuts, go to our accessibility page.

Active-video badge

Find yourself reminding participants to start video? You’ll love this feature. When a participant is in the video chat, a badge now appears to call attention to the Video button for participants who haven’t started video. Learn more about using video here.

Better handling of network interruptions

This release improves handling of interruptions to your internet connection. When you get disconnected from a session, FarPlay now automatically reconnects to the session. On rare occasion, previous versions of FarPlay would get stuck connecting to a session after switching networks (for example, from Wi-Fi to Ethernet). This is now fixed too.

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’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!

You can also get support at our monthly support sessions. Our next monthly support session is Saturday, March 22nd 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (7:00pm-8:30pm Central European time). Sign up here. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers.

We hope you enjoy FarPlay 1.3.1!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

During your FarPlay session, the other musicians are well balanced in your headphones. But when you listen to the recorded mix afterwards, some musicians are too loud and others are too soft.

Is there a solution?

The fix is easy, as we explained at FarPlay’s monthly support session on Saturday February 22nd, 2025. Check out the video below.

• Go to Preferences (by clicking the gear icon, using the FarPlay menu on Macs, or clicking Menu on Windows PCs). Go to the Recording tab.
• Check both the “Apply volume monitor gains when recording a mix” and “Apply monitor panning when recording a multi-user mix” checkboxes. Press OK.

Mix .wav files you record will now use gain and pan adjustments from your session. If the other musicians you play with sound balanced in your headphones during a session, they’ll sound balanced in the mix recording too.

To learn more about making recordings in FarPlay, check out our recording instructions.

—David