FarPlay Blog

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.

Btw — when Dan talks about finding a bassist on Meet to play with, he doesn’t mention that he played 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

We’re thrilled to bring you a very special FarPlay performance. See what happens when Jacob Collier and Dan Tepfer trade musical ideas across the Atlantic.

Dan shares the story behind this magical moment:

I’ve known the crazy brilliant Jacob for a few years, and with him in NYC and me in Paris, we decided to try playing together for the first time, 3500 miles apart, using @farplayapp.

We started with a version of If I Were A Bell where we change meters between 5/4 and 7/4 every 8 bars, keeping the bar length the same (amazingly, this actually worked despite 45ms of latency at this distance, equivalent to playing with someone 45ft / 15m away from you in a room).

Then, spontaneously, we free-improvised the coda you hear here, which keeps returning to the idea of bells ringing.

I love it when improvisation turns into genuine exploration, which it can if, like Jacob, you have patience and big ears. That’s when the magic happens, in the listening.

“Crabfeathers” from California to Québec

Across 2800 miles, Ben Lewis on piano in Chicago, Vince on guitar in California, Jean-Luc Landry on bass in Montreal, and Doug Percell on drums in California play Steve Kuhn’s “Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers” together with a cool, laid-back vibe on FarPlay.

Find your people on FarPlay Meet

The performance above is just one of many musical moments from Ben Lewis’s Open Sessions on FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of FarPlay users, free to all subscribers. Sign up now for early access.

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!). Open Sessions are an easy way to jump in, meet other musicians, and start making music together.

Windows PC causing latency spikes?

Is latency spiking even though everyone’s using Ethernet with Wi-Fi turned off? Check out our new blog post that walks you through a simple fix for Windows PCs.

Monthly support sessions

Sign-ups are available for our monthly support session Saturday, April 18th 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Our following session will be Saturday, May 23rd 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 love 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

Is latency spiking even though everyone’s using Ethernet with Wi-Fi turned off? If you’re on a Windows PC using Windows Audio (not ASIO), try this. Open FarPlay’s Preferences. On the General Options page, change the Audio Buffer Size to 480 and then press OK.

The 1-minute video below provides a walkthrough of these steps.

Note that the spikes in latency might not be seen by the person with the issue, but instead by others in the session. So, try the steps above on your Windows PC even if spikes in Remote Latency are seen only on another musician’s computer and not your own.

If you’d like to lower the latency further on a Windows PC, try turning Windows Signal Enhancements off. Want to lower latency on the PC even more? Use an iRig Stream Mic USB and its official ASIO drivers on the PC. If you already have another audio interface with manufacturer-supplied ASIO drivers, like a Focusrite Scarlett, use that — it’ll work great. Follow the steps in the version of our QuickStart guide customized for Windows PCs with external audio interfaces.

Small buffer sizes of 16, 32, or 64 typically provide the lowest latencies on Macs, Linux computers, and Windows PCs using audio interfaces with manufacturer-supplied ASIO drivers. However, when using, instead, the built-in audio drivers in Windows (like when plugging a headset into a PC’s 3.5-mm headset jack or using a Yeti microphone), small buffer sizes sometimes make an audio device unreliable and generate high and unstable latency. Switching to a buffer size of 480 in these cases dramatically lowers and stabilizes latency.

—David Liao

We’ve started the new year strong with more weekly Open Sessions hosted by Ben Lewis and Eden Casteel on FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider FarPlay community, free to all subscribers. Interested in being among the first to experience Meet? Sign up now for early access.

Here’s a taste of what’s waiting for you. Despite the cross-country distances, Randy Felts on Synthophone (MIDI sax) in Boston, MA, Jean-Luc Landry on bass in Montreal, QC, Robert Jackson on trumpet in Coos Bay, OR, Meri Ziev on vocals in Ocean Ridge, FL, and Eden Casteel on piano in South Kingstown, RI performed this sparkling rendition of Arlen & Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” during one of Eden’s “FarPlay at 4” open mics on Meet.

Eden’s open mics are Wednesdays at 4pm New York time and Ben Lewis’s weekly jazz jams are Tuesdays at 11am New York time. Want to drop in? Join the FarPlay Meet beta — free with your subscription — and look under Open Sessions, where you can browse sessions (or create your own!).

Fix distortion when you play loudly

Do other musicians hear distortion when you sing or play loudly? Simply lower your mic’s input level. The video below shows how we walked a singer through the steps for her in Windows. It’s easy to find the settings in Macs, Windows PCs, and external audio interfaces. For details, check out our new blog post.

Monthly support sessions

Want to get live tech support like in the video above? Sign up for our monthly support session Saturday, February 21st 2:00pm New York time (8:00pm Central European time). Our following session will be Saturday, March 14th 2:00pm New York time (7:00pm Central European time).

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. Sign up for support sessions here.

Get in touch

We love 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 other musicians hear distortion when you sing or play loudly? Simply lower your mic’s input level. You’ll go from audio that peaks and distorts to audio that’s clean.

It’s easy to find the settings in Macs, Windows PCs, and external audio interfaces, as shown below.

These steps fix the problem right away for our ultra-low-latency jamming app FarPlay. You can also use these steps to fix the same problem on a regular video-chat app like Zoom, Teams, and WebEx, but you’ll need an extra step. First, go to your regular video-chat app’s audio settings to turn off automatic mic-level adjustment. Then, use the steps on this page.

Windows PC and mic without gain knob

If you’re using a Windows PC and there’s no physical gain knob or slider for your mic (typical for mics built into PCs and mics on headsets), follow the steps below. The video below walks through the steps for Windows 11.

• Close all other apps that can use the mic.
• Click Start > Settings > System > Sound.
• Scroll down to the Input section. Select the mic you’re using.
• If you’re on Windows 10, click Device Properties.
• While singing or playing at your strongest volume, drag your mic’s Volume slider toward the left until your sound no longer makes your level meter peak.

Mac and mic without gain knob

If you’re using a Mac and a mic that doesn’t have a physical gain knob or slider (typical for mics built into Macs and mics on headsets), use the steps below. Note that if you use a Mac from 2016 or after, we recommend using an external mic because the built-in mic on most Macs from 2016 or later adds 30 ms of latency.

• Close all other apps that can use the mic.
• Click Apple menu > System Settings… > Sound.
• Click the Input tab. Then, click to highlight the mic you’re using.

• While singing or playing at your strongest volume, drag the Input volume slider toward the left until your sound no longer makes your level meter peak.

Mic or audio interface with gain knob

If there’s a physical gain knob or slider for your mic, follow the steps below.

• If your mic is plugged into a Focusrite Scarlett or other external audio interface, find the jack where the mic cable plugs in and look for a knob or slider nearby labeled “Gain” or labeled by an icon of a mic. Your audio interface might have both a mic-level slider and a gain knob. Below are some examples.

• If you have an all-in-one USB mic, find the gain knob on the mic itself. On the iRig Stream Mic USB, for example, find the “MIC GAIN” wheel on the side.

• While singing or playing at your strongest volume, rotate the gain knob counterclockwise, rotate the gain wheel toward lower numbers, or pull the gain slider down until your sound no longer makes your level meter peak.

—David Liao

As the year wraps up, we’re wishing you a holiday season and new year filled with music and new connections.

Vocalist Paul Marinaro couldn’t be home for Christmas with his mom this year, so he and pianist Ben Lewis recorded this tender performance of Kent, Gannon, and Ram’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” for her. Though both musicians live in Chicago, they couldn’t find a time and place to meet in person, but with FarPlay, they were able to make their recording online in about ten minutes on Christmas morning.

Want to make music with Ben and other musicians on FarPlay? Ben’s weekly jazz jams and Eden Casteel’s weekly open mics continue in the new year on FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider FarPlay community, free to all subscribers. To be among the first to experience Meet, sign up now for early access to the beta. Then, to browse sessions (or create your own), look under Open Sessions. Thanks to everyone who helped test FarPlay Meet this year!

How far apart can you play together?

Musicians are often surprised to learn that the answer is a lot farther than they expect. When network connections and computer and audio-device performance are optimized, latency is imperceptible at short distances. At medium distances, latency is noticeable, but musicians can still play a wide variety of styles together. For long distances, latency is too high for playing together in rhythm, but playing non-rhythmic music together can still be fun! Check out the recordings of different styles and distances in our new blog post on this topic.

Monthly support sessions

Sign-ups are available for the first monthly support sessions of 2026, which will be Saturday, January 17th and Saturday, February 21st, 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time) on both dates. 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 live tech support for FarPlay and FarPlay Meet.

Get in touch

We love 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