FarPlay Blog

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.

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.

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

We get this question a lot! Musicians are often surprised to learn that the answer is a lot farther than they expect.

The time it takes for the sound one musician makes to reach another musician’s ears is called latency.

Even when playing together in the same room, there’s some latency, because sound travels through air at about 1 foot per millisecond (ms), meaning it takes about one thousandth of a second for sound to travel one foot (or 3 ms to travel 1 meter). Studies have shown that musicians start to notice latency when it exceeds about 20 ms one-way, about as long as it takes for sound to travel from one musician to another 20 feet (7 m) away in the same room. For some styles of music, latencies up to 45 ms or more can be acceptable; for example, musicians at opposite ends of a symphony orchestra, often 50+ feet apart, regularly experience latencies over 50 ms.

When you play music together over the internet, latency and audio quality depend on factors including network connections (for example, fiber has lower latency than cable), distance, and computer and audio-device performance. For details, check out our latency tutorial.

When internet connections and computer and audio-device performance are optimal, latency mainly depends on distance between musicians. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, physics tells us, so the farther you are from someone you’re playing with, the longer it takes for audio data to travel between you. Under good network conditions, FarPlay can produce latencies below 40 ms even with 3000 miles (4800 km) of distance between participants, and well below 20 ms within 1000 miles (1600 km).

At short distances, latency is essentially imperceptible. 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! How far you can play depends on performance styles, as the examples below show.

Rhythmically precise styles

Fast percussion, playing the same rhythms on instruments with fast attacks, and clapping together to teach rhythms in lessons all make latency noticeable at relatively short distances.

For musicians in the same or nearby cities, latency can be low enough even for math metal. In this example, Brittany Anjou (piano), Rich Bennett (guitar), and Noah Garabedian (bass) rehearse “Daughter Laughter” by the Friendly Bears. Brittany writes, “We are pretty astounded and pleased how easy it was to rehearse with FarPlay even though we all live in three different neighborhoods in Brooklyn.”

Baroque music is rhythmically detailed and precise. Even so, a distance of 120 miles (200 km) is small enough for Marco Pierobon (trumpet, Parma, Italy), Francesco Gibellini (trumpet, Reggio Emilia, Italy), Stefano Ammannati (tuba, Genova, Italy), and Aldo Pizzagalli (trumpet, Lugano, Switzerland) to stay locked together in time as they perform a stirring rendition of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s “Fanfare-Rondeau”.

In Johan Eriksson’s trio’s rhythmically driving arrangement of Chopin’s Prelude in D Major below, the bass, guitar, and piano play together on most beats, which would easily reveal any latency issues, but the nearly 700 miles (1100 km) they’re playing across is still close enough for sounding as together as they’d sound in one room.

If you try to line up percussion and plucked notes at distances well beyond 1000 miles, latency is unquestionably audible, as in the lesson excerpt below. Here, Oteil Burbridge played bass guitar from California with Nikki Glaspie on drums in New York, a 2900-mile drive away. But notice also that the bass and drums are playing different rhythms, rather than in unison, so the latency is subtle and perfectly acceptable for this style of music lesson.

Accompanying vocalists

A duet between a singer and an instrumentalist is much less demanding than the styles above, as far as latency is concerned, because singing usually has more smooth onsets and fewer fast attacks, compared with struck or plucked instruments.

Stephannie Moore on vocals in Florida and Ben Lewis on piano in Chicago are a 1400-mile drive apart. Yet, they perform Sara Bareilles’s “She Used To Be Mine” with the same kind of tender, intimate sound you might expect from musicians sharing a stage at a night club.

At a distance of 4000 miles between New York City and Dresden, mezzo-soprano Valerie Eickhoff and pianist Elenora Pertz experienced a latency of about 55 ms, which was subtly noticeable to them as they played, but they’re still able to rehearse Clara Schumann’s song “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen” beautifully.

Jazz improvisation

Jazz is a highly rhythmically sophisticated art form. If, for example, you want to play an uptempo Bebop head in unison, you’ll need latency below 20 ms. However, the freedom inherent in jazz improvisation makes rhythmic improvisation possible even over wide distances, depending on tempo and instrumentation. For example, because it’s common for singers to float or back-phrase, a piano-voice duet will be able to tolerate higher latency than a bass-drums duet.

Our own Dan Tepfer in Brooklyn and Thomas Enhco in Paris, France improvised rhythmically together on piano in this live broadcast performance of Chuck Wayne’s jazz standard “Solar”, 3600 miles (6000 km) apart.

Free improvisation

At distances that prevent playing together at all but the slowest tempos, musical styles that don’t emphasize rhythm, such as drone music, ambient music, or non-pulsed free improvisation can remain comfortably playable, as Dan Tepfer on piano in Brooklyn and Seigo Matsunaga on double bass in Kyushu, Japan, demonstrate. At a distance of 6800 miles (11000 km), they had around 80 ms of latency, definitely noticeable, but not a problem for this style of real-time music making.

How far do you play with FarPlay?

The easiest way to find out whether FarPlay works for your distances, internet connections, musical styles, etc. is to test FarPlay for free. Check out our requirements and get set up with our QuickStart guide.

You can use FarPlay’s free mode to create as many 1:1 sessions as you like (each up to 45 minutes long). To try out group (multi-user) sessions, use our Standard and Standard+ subscriptions, which include a free trial month. These subscriptions include additional premium features, like recording (compare plans). Speaking of recordings, feel free to send us yours. We’d love to share them on our socials and showcase how far you play with FarPlay!

—David Liao

A very big happy birthday to the FarPlay user community and app! We released our first public beta four years ago this month. Many thanks to everyone who has supported FarPlay in our continuing journey.

Thanks also to all of you who’ve been testing FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider FarPlay community, free to all subscribers. Meet remains in invitation-only testing. Interested in being among the first to experience Meet? Sign up now for early access to the beta.

What can you record remotely? An album!

Congratulations to Distansorkestern for this month’s release of their album Variations on a Star. Thanks to FarPlay, band members Johan Eriksson Rapp and Anders Teglund recorded all 20 of the album’s variations on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” 250 miles (400 km) apart in Sweden. In addition to the technical achievement, their music is lovely.

We’ve worked hard to make FarPlay easy to use, so it can be easy to forget the powerful features it offers under the hood, like multi-track studio-quality recording, available with a Standard+ subscription.

FarPlay at 4 with Eden

Calling all singers and players! The incomparable Eden Casteel is launching FarPlay at 4, her new weekly online open mic series. Wednesdays 4:00pm–5:00pm New York time, you’re invited to drop by, plug in, and make music together in real time. The first session is November 26, and you can join for free via FarPlay Meet.

If you’ve ever wanted to sing with a truly fun and wildly talented accompanist, this is your moment. Eden is a reliably hilarious piano bar and open mic entertainer based in Rhode Island — but thanks to FarPlay that doesn’t matter! She writes and music-directs solo musicals (including her acclaimed cabaret Kahn Artist: Madeline And Me about her lifetime love of the Oscar-nominated actress), coaches singers, plays dueling-pianos shows, and brings infectious joy to every session she hosts. Learn more about her at edencasteel.com.

Ready to make music with Eden? Simply join the FarPlay Meet beta — free with your subscription — and look for Eden’s sessions under Open Sessions, where Meet users like you can browse and add sessions. Everyone’s welcome! If you love to plan ahead, you can even send Eden your music in advance at eden@edencasteel.com.

In related news, acclaimed jazz pianist Ben Lewis’ jazz jam sessions continue on a weekly basis with an evolving crew of participants. If you’d like to join, head to FarPlay Meet and look under Open Sessions.

Keep students waiting, if you like

When musicians join your Persistent Room before you start a session, they go to your Waiting Room. You can now have musicians in your Waiting Room stay there when you start your Persistent Room session, rather than being brought in the moment you join — perfect for teachers who want to check their audio and video before a lesson.

To turn this feature on, go to Account Preferences, scroll down to Persistent Rooms, check the Locked by default box for the desired room, and press Save Changes. Learn more about the Waiting Room in our account-management instructions.

Fix balance in mix recordings

Do some people sound loud and others soft in your mix recordings even though everyone sounds well-balanced in your headphones during sessions? Click Preferences, Recording, and then “Apply monitor volume gains when recording a mix“, as attendees of our monthly support session last month learned. See our blog post to learn more.

Interested in joining our monthly support session Saturday, November 22nd 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time)? Sign ups are still open! Our following session will be Saturday, December 20th 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. Sign up for monthly 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