FarPlay Blog

FarPlay 1.4.0 is here! We’re proud to bring you this major update, which aligns with our vision of FarPlay as a tool that’s both easy to use and uncompromisingly powerful. FarPlay now runs natively on Macs with Apple silicon. It also remembers your audio devices when they aren’t connected and, on Mac and Windows, starts using them again when you plug them in. You can save your Input Mixer setup to a file and load it again later, and Mac users with a Standard+ or FarPlay For Teachers subscription can send session video to their livestreaming app. We’ve also fixed screen sharing bugs on both Mac and Windows. Upgrade for free here.

FarPlay now runs natively on Apple silicon

FarPlay 1.4.0 for macOS 11.0+ runs natively on Macs with Apple silicon, so you won’t see this notification anymore:

FarPlay also opens right away after you install it, without waiting for macOS to translate it from Intel code first. To get FarPlay for Apple silicon, download FarPlay for macOS 11.0+ from our download page. The same download still runs on Intel-based Macs.

FarPlay remembers your audio devices

Ever opened FarPlay before reconnecting your audio interface? When FarPlay couldn’t find the audio interface you used last time, it used to switch to No Audio and forget the interface in your Input Mixer tracks, so you had to choose it again in each place. FarPlay 1.4.0 keeps your selections and shows ❌ in front of any device that isn’t connected.

On Mac and Windows, just plug the device in: FarPlay starts using it again automatically, in your Input Mixer too. If ❌ is still showing after you’ve connected the device, choose it again from the same pull-down menu.

Save and load your Input Mixer setup

Once your Input Mixer is set up the way you like it, FarPlay 1.4.0 can save its tracks to a file, including each track’s audio device, channels, volume, pan, mute, solo, and reverb. For example, you could keep one setup for teaching and another for your band, and load whichever one you need.

During a session with Input Mixer selected as your Microphone, go to Session > Input Mixer Options and choose Save Input Mixer Config As…. To use a saved setup, choose Load Input Mixer Config… from the same menu. For details, see our Input Mixer instructions.

New to the Input Mixer? If you’re only using inputs 1 and 2 of your audio interface, this video from one of our support sessions shows how you can use the Input Mixer to access all input channels on your audio devices.

Send session video to your livestream (Mac)

FarPlay’s Broadcast Output already sends your session’s audio to livestreaming apps, and FarPlay for Mac can now send the video too: Syphon Video Output sends your video, and the video of each participant, to apps on your Mac that can receive Syphon video, such as OBS Studio. It’s included with Standard+ and FarPlay For Teachers subscriptions.

During a session, click Video in the Tools section to open the video window. Then click the Video menu and choose Syphon Video Output. In your livestreaming app, choose FarPlay Camera for your own video, or FarPlay – followed by a participant’s name for theirs. To turn Syphon Video Output on and off together with Broadcast Output, check Activate Syphon Video Output along with Broadcast Output in the Broadcast Output window. Learn more in our Broadcast Output instructions.

For now, FarPlay can only output separate video streams, one for each participant. We’re working on bringing Syphon gallery output to a future version of FarPlay.

Screen sharing bugs fixed on Mac and Windows

We’ve fixed some screen sharing bugs from earlier versions of FarPlay.

Mac: Minimizing a window could stop screen sharing. A bug turned screen sharing off whenever your Dock changed size, which can happen when a minimized window lands on the Dock.

Windows: With some display-scaling settings, such as custom scaling, screen sharing failed to start, so you had to change your scaling to share your screen.

Both: Changing your display settings, or connecting or disconnecting a display, could also stop screen sharing.

All of these issues are fixed in FarPlay 1.4.0.

Get in touch

Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide, which you can open from the Help menu in the latest version of FarPlay. For tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. To reach us privately, to tell us how you use FarPlay, or for business inquiries, see our contact page.

You can also get support at our monthly support sessions. Our next session is Saturday, November 21st 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm 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 enjoy FarPlay 1.4.0!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

It’s been fun bumping into so many of you on FarPlay Meet, our platform for connecting with the wider FarPlay community.

This Saturday: September 19th

Our next monthly support session is Saturday, September 19th 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Our following session will be Saturday, October 24th 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Sign up for monthly support sessions here.

Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers subscribers.

Your students can record their own lessons

At last month’s support session, a teacher asked whether she’d have to send her student the lesson recording afterward. She doesn’t. Anyone in a session created by a FarPlay For Teachers subscriber can click Start Recording, even without a FarPlay account, and students don’t need an account to join a session in the first place.

Choppy screen sharing? Here’s the fix

We fixed a bug that in some cases caused low-quality settings to be selected in Video Preferences, including when clicking the Reset to Defaults button. The fix was on our end, so you don’t need to reinstall FarPlay — keep using the latest version, 1.3.3.

If your video or screen-sharing resolution or frame rate is too low, go to Preferences > Video, click Reset to Defaults, and click OK. If the resolution or frame rate is still too low, go back to Preferences > Video, choose the values suggested in our video instructions, and click OK.

Get in touch

Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide. For tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. To reach us privately, to tell us how you use FarPlay, or for business inquiries, see our contact page.

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Get your students running with FarPlay — the easy way

New students don’t have to figure FarPlay out on their own. You can send yours to any of our monthly support sessions, where we can help them get set up — wired headphones, a test call, and the rest — before their first lesson with you.

Our next session is Saturday, August 22nd 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time), and there’s still time to sign up. Our following session will be Saturday, September 19th 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time).

Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers subscribers. Come with a student, or send them along on their own.

The teacher’s cheat sheet

Teaching this fall? Our teaching page is one-stop shopping for what teachers ask for most: whether students need to subscribe to join lessons (they don’t), whether students need Ethernet, a message template you can customize and send to new students, and more.

What a livestream can’t do

Last summer, two-time Grammy-winning bassist Oteil Burbridge taught at the Roots Rock Revival camp in upstate New York — without being there. He was in San Francisco for Dead & Company’s concerts celebrating the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary.

Listen to what he does in this clip: he tells the guitar player to play “sticky” to the bass, and then plays along with and listens to the students. That second half is the part a livestream can’t give you.

Creating your Meet profile just got easier

You can now easily upload a video from your computer or paste in a link to a YouTube video. Of course, you can still record a video in your browser, if you like. If you started a profile and stopped at the video step, this is a great moment to pick it back up.

To learn about this and more — including browsing and connecting with other musicians and setting up a Teacher Profile (if you have a For Teachers subscription) — see our guide to getting started with Meet.

Four cities, one ballad

Eden Casteel’s vocals glide over Doug Percell’s brushes on Jimmy Van Heusen’s classic “Darn That Dream,” with FarPlay co-founder Dan Tepfer at the piano and Jean-Luc Landry on bass.

Dan hosted the Open Session on FarPlay Meet from Brooklyn, with Eden in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, Jean-Luc in Montreal, and Doug in Orange County, California — that’s 2,900 miles of road between the farthest ends of the band.

Want to join in? Go to the Open Sessions section of Meet and browse live and upcoming sessions or create your own. Jazz pianist Ben Lewis’s weekly jams, for example, are a great place for instrumentalists and singers of all levels to get started (or even just to listen).

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!

Wishing you a great start to the school year!

—David Liao and the FarPlay team

When you’re in the middle of a session, a key combo is quicker than the mouse.

Mute yourself (cough, step out for a phone call, etc.) — Mac: Option-Command-M / Windows: Control-Alt-M

Show Main Window (find volume controls hiding behind video window) — Mac: Command-1 / Windows: Control-1

Collapse all remote user subpanels in a multi-user session (in large multi-user sessions, see all participants’ levels and gains at a glance) — Mac: Command-Left / Windows: Control-Left

For more keyboard shortcuts, check out our accessibility page.

A fresh take on Charles Lloyd’s “Forest Flower”

Check out this fresh spin on Charles Lloyd’s post-bop “Forest Flower” from one of Ben Lewis’s weekly Open Sessions on FarPlay Meet. This version shifts between even eighths and a swung feel with the new groove locking in each time right after the old one drops—no working back into it.

Ben Lewis was on Rhodes in Chicago, Jean-Luc Landry on bass in Montreal, Tim Green at the piano in Meridian, Idaho, and Doug Percell on drums down in Orange County, California. 2,800 miles couldn’t stop them from playing together.

This is exactly what FarPlay Meet is built for. Meet helps you find musicians around the world by musical style, instrument, and distance, and it’s now available to all FarPlay subscribers. Visit meet.farplay.io to create your profile.

macOS is NOT about to drop support for FarPlay

If you’ve been using FarPlay on macOS 26 Tahoe, you might have seen a message warning that FarPlay “will not open in a future release of macOS.” Rest assured that FarPlay will continue to run on macOS, as explained in a recent blog post.

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. There’s still time to sign up for our session today, Saturday, July 18th 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Our following session will be Saturday, August 22nd 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm 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 1.3.3 and FarPlay Meet!

—David Liao and the FarPlay team

If you’re running macOS 26 Tahoe, you might have seen this notification announcing the end of support for “Intel-based” apps and warning that FarPlay “will not open in a future release of macOS.” What’s an Intel-based app, and is FarPlay about to stop working on Macs?

First and foremost, FarPlay is not about to stop running on Macs.

Here’s what has been happening and what Apple has planned. Apple used to make Macs with Intel processors and then switched to Apple silicon processors starting in 2020. Intel-based apps are apps that run natively on Macs with Intel processors. Macs with Apple silicon chips also currently run Intel-based apps, using a utility called Rosetta 2. FarPlay is indeed an Intel-based app.

Over the coming year or so, Apple will finish migrating from Intel to Apple silicon in two stages. Around this fall (2026), Apple is expected to release macOS 27 Golden Gate, which will not support Macs that use Intel processors, but will continue to run Intel-based apps as Apple has itself said. Next fall (2027), Apple is expected to release macOS 28, which they’ve announced won’t run most Intel-based apps. The notification you’re seeing now is warning about being unable to open FarPlay in the version of macOS expected to be released over a year from now. Of course, we’ll release an Apple silicon-based version of FarPlay well ahead of that time.

—David Liao

Great news! FarPlay 1.3.3 is now available. This maintenance release fixes a bug that caused the latency slider to switch to Auto mode when remote participants joined sessions in which Manual mode was selected. Version 1.3.3 also fixes a bug that caused titles of Open Sessions to overwrite titles of Chat Banners. Finally, we’ve increased the frame rate for high-resolution video and screen sharing sent from some computers. The video encoder can now use additional CPU cores on computers with 4 or more cores.

Please upgrade now (upgrades are always free).

Get started with FarPlay Meet

It’s been great seeing FarPlay users connect with new musicians since we launched FarPlay Meet earlier this month. In the video below, FarPlay co-founder and pianist Dan Tepfer gives a quick introduction to Meet.

Whether you’re looking for people to play with, curious about dropping into an Open Session, or interested in studying with a teacher on FarPlay, this is a great place to start.

By the way, when Dan mentions finding a bassist to play with on Meet, he leaves out one fun detail: he was playing his secondary instrument, alto sax. Here’s an excerpt from the NYC–Sacramento session he did with Meet member and passionate amateur jazz bassist Jorge Guzman, on the standard “Body and Soul.”

Joining Meet is easy, and access is already included with your subscription. Join the community today.

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, July 18th 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Sign up here. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers.

—David Liao and the FarPlay team

Dear FarPlay Community,

When Anton and I set about creating FarPlay five years ago, it was out of a belief that a world in which it’s easier to make music with others is a better world. 

We’re incredibly proud of the reliable, user-friendly, powerful and fast application that FarPlay has become. I use it all the time, and am still shocked at what it can do. My recent Paris—New York session with Jacob Collier is a great example: if you’d told me six years ago that we’d be trading intricate metric modulations 3,500 miles apart, I wouldn’t have believed you.

But a question has been nagging at me this whole time. FarPlay dramatically extends your reach as a musician, but how do you find other people to play with? If you’ve been using FarPlay for a while, you know it can take some effort to get a new musician on board. Meanwhile, thousands of musicians are already using FarPlay — people who already know and love the platform. If I’m a jazz pianist looking for a great bassist to play with, how can I find one in the FarPlay community?

That question led us to create FarPlay Meet.

At first, I imagined something like my local tennis league, which pairs people based on skill level. But music isn’t tennis. It isn’t about winning or losing, and choosing a playing partner is deeply subjective. I might personally prefer to play with a drummer who has a great feel but less technique. That led to an important realization: FarPlay shouldn’t decide who would be a good playing partner for me. I should decide that for myself, based on how I feel when I hear someone play.

Today, we’re officially launching FarPlay Meet for all FarPlay subscribers.

On Meet, you can browse profiles of other musicians, filtered by style, instrument, and distance. Found someone you’d like to play with? Send them a connection request. Once they accept, use Meet’s chat feature to find a time to play. In a hurry to make music? Join one of Meet’s regular Open Sessions, which are open to all. You’ll find me popping into these too. 

Meet is included with every FarPlay subscription. You must be a subscriber to access it, and I think this is one of its best features: it helps ensure that Meet is a community of real people, committed like you to the joy of making music. 

Thanks to our beta testers, there are already dozens of profiles on Meet, and a lovely community is emerging. But the real power of Meet will come when there are not dozens, but thousands of people there. The larger the community becomes, the easier it’ll be to find the perfect people to play with. 

So the success of Meet depends on you. If the idea of a thriving community of like-minded musicians eager to make music together appeals to you, please head to meet.farplay.io now and create your profile. It only takes a few minutes. And if you’re a teacher, create a Teacher Profile as well so potential students can find you. 

The dream is to make FarPlay the best place in the world to forge new musical friendships. I hope you’ll join us in building it.

Looking forward to connecting with you soon,
Dan Tepfer, FarPlay co-founder

Jacob Collier on FarPlay: “philosophically crazy”

Your response to Jacob Collier and Dan Tepfer’s free-improvised coda has been incredible. Now, here’s another moment from their NYC-Paris session that showcases FarPlay’s rhythmic power: they play the jazz standard If I Were a Bell with a metric modulation, alternating between 5/4 and 7/4 time signatures while keeping the bar length steady.

Dan writes, “I’m still amazed that we were able to do something this rhythmically intricate 3500 miles (5600 km) apart. We had about 45 ms of latency on @farplayapp, equivalent to playing with someone 45 ft (15 m) away from you in a room, which is noticeable but subtle: it just feels like the other person is laying back a bit on the beat.”

Jacob had this to say: “It’s such a trip to play without thinking about the latency from this far away. It’s like philosophically crazy to me.”

Cross-country Blue Bossa

The musicians are spread across 2900 miles, but the lilting bossa groove and harmonica’s yearning melody just fit. Ben Lewis on piano in Chicago, Jean-Luc Landry on guitar in Montreal, Gary Cziko on harmonica in Playa Del Ray, CA, Tim Green on bass in Meridian, ID, and Doug Percell on drums in Orange County, CA perform Kenny Dorham’s “Blue Bossa” during one of Ben Lewis’s recent Open Sessions on FarPlay Meet, our new platform that lets you connect with the wider community of FarPlay users, free to all subscribers.

Want to join in or create your own Open Sessions? Sign up to test FarPlay Meet. After you’ve created your profile on Meet, check out the schedule of Open Sessions, including Ben Lewis’s weekly jazz jams and Eden Casteel’s weekly open mics — or create your own Open Sessions!

No Sound from Your Instrument?

Plugged your instrument or mic into your audio interface but the sound isn’t coming into FarPlay? Change the Microphone in FarPlay to the Input Mixer, and create tracks for as many mics, instruments, and other audio sources as you’d like! For details, check out our recent blog post.

Scheduled maintenance

To accommodate FarPlay’s growing usage, we will upgrade the farplay.io website Sunday, May 24th between 3:00am and 4:00am New York time (between 9:00am and 10:00am Central European time). The website will be offline for approximately 5 minutes during this upgrade.

The FarPlay app will continue to work during the upgrade, but session-invitation links will not. To join a session while the website is offline, click Join Session in the FarPlay app and enter the session’s ID.

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

Monthly support sessions

You can still sign up for our monthly support session today Saturday, May 23rd 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Our following session will be Sunday, June 21st 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Sign up for support sessions here.

Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers subscribers. These sessions are a great way to get help with FarPlay and FarPlay Meet.

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 1.3.2!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Plugged your instrument or mic into your audio interface but the sound isn’t coming into FarPlay? Change the Microphone in FarPlay to the Input Mixer, and create tracks for as many mics, instruments, and other audio sources as you’d like!

• In the Devices subpanel, click the Microphone pull-down menu and choose Input Mixer.

• In the Input Mixer window that pops up, click the first track’s input-device menu, which initially says “No Audio”, and choose your audio interface. Set the channel selector to an input channel you’d like to use.  

• Press the circled plus to create as many additional input tracks as you’d like. For each track, choose the input device (you can use more than one device at the same time!) and input channels to use.  

• Use a track’s slider to adjust the track’s gain.

• To label tracks with custom names, type into the text boxes at the bottoms of the tracks. 

• To listen to the mix you’re sending to other musicians, drag the monitor slider under your name toward the right. 

To learn more about the Input Mixer (including stereo panning and our built-in reverb feature), see our mixer instructions.

—David Liao

FarPlay 1.3.2 is here, bringing a new Chat Banner and friendly invitation messages that make it easier to invite and welcome participants to your sessions — all thanks to your feedback. This version streamlines Preferences, improves support for Unicode characters, and incorporates our new logo. Upgrade for free here.

Version 1.3.2 also includes improvements to support for FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of FarPlay users, free to all subscribers. For early access to Meet, sign up here.

Say hello to our new logo!

We’re grateful to Blaine Billingsley, a passionate jazz guitarist and FarPlayer who also happens to be a world-class designer, for creating our new logo. He had this to say about the design process: “We tried many options and I just kept coming back to this 16th note F-form. It’s all the things that FarPlay is: simple, fast, powerful, flowing, and fun! It says to me ‘Let’s play’.”

Check out Blaine’s latest solo guitar album, a fascinating exploration of his jazz and folk roots, here.

Chat Banner

This release introduces a new feature for subscribers: you can now customize your Persistent Room with a pinned banner message in the chat window — great for a welcome note and sharing links to pdfs, for example. Check out our instructions for customizing the Chat Banner here.

With a FarPlay for Teachers subscription, you can have up to ten Persistent Rooms. Thanks to the Chat Banner, each of these can now have its own dedicated identity. You might have one for your weekly jazz ensemble linking to lead sheets for example, and another for your students linking to a folder of exercises.

Send friendly invitations

Click the Invite button and then click Copy invitation to copy an easy-to-read message (for emails and text messages, for example) that includes your FarPlay session’s name and link.

Settings, simplified

Version 1.3.2 brings a few updates to FarPlay Preferences. We’ve moved Video Preferences to their own tab in the main Preferences window. This means you can now change video settings before joining a video chat (or even a session).

On Windows, we’ve updated the default audio buffer size for non-ASIO devices to 480. This is the most reliable setting for basic audio hardware on Windows and should work well with all devices. For lower latency, you can manually try smaller buffer sizes to check whether they’re supported by your audio hardware. If you’d like the lowest possible latency on Windows, use an external audio interface with ASIO drivers.

Improved handling of special characters

We’ve improved Unicode support on both Windows and Mac, which means non-English characters are now correctly handled in participant and audio-device names. This fixes a bug that prevented device selection in some cases.

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 sessions are Saturday, April 18th 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time) and Saturday, May 23rd 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Sign up here. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers.

We hope you enjoy FarPlay 1.3.2!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team