To celebrate, Distansorkestern band members Johan Eriksson Rapp and Anders Teglund are back with their variation No. 2 on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, performed together live over FarPlay. Johan and Anders were 250 miles (400 km) apart, but FarPlay’s latency is so low that they felt like they were in the same room. Cozy and warm, this recording is perfect for the holiday season.
Our most accessible FarPlay explainer yet
Want to introduce FarPlay to friends? We know it can be challenging to explain what our cutting-edge low-latency audio makes possible to people who haven’t yet experienced it. Our goal in the video below was to present it in a way that even non-musicians could easily understand. At FarPlay, we believe integrity is everything. In that spirit, the actors in the video aren’t pretending: at first, they’re actually trying to sing Happy Birthday over Zoom; then, they’re actually experiencing how easy and natural it is to do it over FarPlay. Enjoy!
Looking for an easy way to invite people to their first FarPlay session? We’ve made a template to help. Check it out here, and of course, feel free to customize it!
Audio-interface inputs full? Add a talkback mic anyway!
New York City multi-instrumentalist Brittany Anjou wanted to add a talkback mic to help her students hear her speak, but her piano mics already used both inputs on her audio interface. FarPlay’s input mixer saved the day. Watch the highlights below from FarPlay’s last monthly support session.
Our next tech-support session is on Saturday, January 18th, 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time). Sign up here. Monthly tech-support sessions are free for paid subscribers.
Get in touch
We’ve been loving featuring our amazing users. If you’d like to be included — whether you use FarPlay for lessons, rehearsals, jam sessions, or conversations — we’d love to talk to you. You can let us know by emailing us at contact@farplay.io.
Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide, which you can open from the Help menu in the latest version of FarPlay. If you haven’t already, upgrade free to the latest version.
If you’d like to ask tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. If you need to reach us privately, email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!
This question comes up a lot, not just with our ultra-low-latency audio app FarPlay, but also with regular communication apps like Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, etc.
If you’re just having a conversation or taking turns playing in a lesson, you’re not playing together in rhythmic sync, so you don’t need to use Ethernet. You also don’t have to use FarPlay, but there are still great reasons to: even with just Wi-Fi, FarPlay can provide substantially better audio quality and latency than with Zoom. And FarPlay’s full-duplex (simultaneous two-way) audio lets you talk over each other naturally, a relief compared to the frustrating game of “No, no, you go ahead” you might have played in regular video conferences.
It’s worth noting that when Ethernet isn’t required, it’s still preferred, and this goes for both FarPlay and regular meeting apps like Zoom. Compared with Wi-Fi, Ethernet gives you fewer dropouts and less distortion.
If you want to make music together in rhythmic sync (especially tight “pocket playing”), connect your computer and router with an Ethernet cable. And use FarPlay to get the best latency possible over your connection.
Plug one end of your Ethernet cable into your computer or a USB-to-Ethernet adapter (for USB-C or USB-A). Turn Wi-Fi off on your computer. Plug the other end of the Ethernet cable into the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters the home. Usually Ethernet just works. Occasionally, you might need to wait a minute or reboot the router before the router recognizes your computer’s Ethernet connection.
Avoid repeater/extender routers.
And avoid Ethernet-over-Power adapters.
Ethernet cables can be up to 300 feet long without signal degradation. You can roll the cable out just for a session and roll it back up afterward. No need to drill holes and bury an Ethernet cable in walls.
Compared to the time and cost of driving to another musician, spending, say, $10 on a 25-ft Ethernet cable, $15 on a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, and a minute to roll out a cable is a bargain.
If you absolutely can’t use Ethernet (maybe a homeowner doesn’t allow you to run a cord down the hall), you can try the options below, but they tend to be complicated, less reliable, disruptive to housemates, or expensive.
Wired alternatives: Yes to MoCA, no to Powerline
If wiring for cable TV connects rooms in your home, you can connect your computer and router using a pair of MoCA 2.5 adapters. Use one adapter to connect your computer to one end of a TV cable. Use the second adapter to connect your router to another end of a TV cable. Turn Wi-Fi off on your computer.
Your computer and router should now have a wired connection through your home’s TV wiring, but beware.
MoCA 2.5 costs more than Ethernet (a pair of MoCA 2.5 adapters costs about $125, compared to about $45 combined for a long 100-ft Ethernet cable and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter).
Until you test with a pair of MoCA adapters, you might not know whether TV wiring and splitters hidden in your walls are optimized for MoCA. To see how wiring matters, check out Dong Ngo’s blog post on MoCA.
Compared to Ethernet, MoCA adds a little latency (perhaps a few milliseconds).
If you do decide to use MoCA, use MoCA 2.5 adapters, which can transmit data more efficiently than adapters using older MoCA standards (MoCA didn’t support full-duplex transmission until version 2.5).
When you shop for MoCA adapters, Ethernet-over-Power adapters (like “Powerline” adapters) might show up. As mentioned earlier, avoidthese.
Ethernet-over-Power adapters use your home’s electrical wiring for the connection, so, yes, like MoCA, Ethernet-over-Power gives your computer and router a wired connection. However, Ethernet-over-Power provides relatively slow speeds and is susceptible to interference from household appliances and problems with household wiring, as explained in Dong’s blog post on Powerline networking. Dong writes that Powerline is “suitable for those needing only a moderately-performing network”, not what we want for playing music in rhythmic sync online.
Optimizing Wi-Fi
Still want to play in rhythmic sync over Wi-Fi? Check out the suggestions below. It’s great if these work for you. If they don’t, remember, Ethernet is still the most reliable and, typically, simplest option.
Reduce Wi-Fi congestion
Try turning Wi-Fi off on other devices in your home. In some cases, turning Wi-Fi off on just your phone and tablet will help a lot, but in other cases, you’ll need to turn Wi-Fi off on all devices in your home other than the computer running FarPlay, and this might not be possible if a housemate uses Wi-Fi to work from home, for example.
If your router provides a 2.4 GHz network and a 5 GHz network, try connecting only the computer running FarPlay to the 5 GHz network. Connect all other devices in your home to the 2.4 GHz network.
This method has drawbacks. You might degrade Wi-Fi connections for other devices in your home. If your router doesn’t already provide two separate networks, you’ll need to log into your router settings, make sure Self-Organizing Network (SON) is off, and create two SSIDs.
Upgrade to Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7
You can upgrade your router and computer toWi-Fi 6, 6E or, even better, 7. These newer standards do a better job of providing low latency in congested Wi-Fi networks. It’s worth noting that better doesn’t mean perfect. I recently tech-supported a user who uses a Wi-Fi 6 router. Indeed, their latency over Wi-Fi was stable most of the time, but I’d occasionally see their latency jump. In rehearsals, such latency jumps can randomly interrupt a groove — annoying!
Even with Wi-Fi 6 or higher, you might still need to turn Wi-Fi off for other devices in the home, or you might still need to create a dedicated SSID for the computer running FarPlay.
And even if you use all our suggestions for improving your Wi-Fi connection, your connection could still be degraded by interference, from devices outside your home, for example. Bottom line, if you want the connection to “just work”, follow the advice in FarPlay’s QuickStart guide: use Ethernet.
Why does Wi-Fi make it harder to play in sync online?
The problem isn’t just weak signals. Even when your computer and router are next to each other and signals are strong, Wi-Fi can produce high and unstable latency. Why? Congestion. Especially with older standards, when multiple household devices (computers, smartphones, tablets, etc.) try to communicate at the same time, you get a Wi-Fi-traffic jam. Your computer ends up waiting its turn to communicate with the router. If you use a wireless repeater router, communication between the repeater router and main router can be delayed by traffic jams too. Such delays are fine when loading a web page, but can make it impossible to play together in rhythmic sync online. Every suggestion we’ve provided helps you avoid congestion delays by avoiding Wi-Fi, reducing congestion on your Wi-Fi network, or upgrading to newer Wi-Fi standards that handle congestion better.
Does your Mac add animated reactions to video chats in FarPlay, FaceTime, Skype, etc.? Maybe a thumbs-up emoji appears when you make a thumbs-up sign, or maybe you see other animations like fireworks or balloons. In online music lessons or work meetings, these animations can be annoying.
Get rid of them by turning off video reactions. Watch the video below to see how. Works for regular communication apps like FaceTime and Skype, as well as our ultra-low-latency audio app FarPlay.
Start video in a communication app. In FaceTime, video starts when you open the app. In Skype, go to Settings > Audio & Video. In FarPlay, start a video chat (could be with just yourself).
Click the green camera icon at the top of the screen.
Click the green Reactions icon.
Repeat the steps above for other apps in which unwanted Apple Reactions appear.
Mezzo-soprano Valerie Eickhoff, Winner of the 2024 Opus Klassik New Talent of the Year award, and pianist Elenora Pertz rehearse live between New York City and Dresden, 4000 miles apart. They had about 55ms of latency at this distance, and still were able to rehearse beautifully in this style of music. Here they perform Clara Schumann’s German art song — or “Lied” — “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen”. Btw, that lovely reverb you hear on Valerie’s voice is our new built-in reverb, introduced in FarPlay 1.3 (free download here).
Ahead of their duo gig at Mezzrow Jazz Club, Dayna Stephens and our very own Dan Tepfer rehearsed live over the internet using FarPlay. They had 15ms of latency between Brooklyn and New Jersey, equivalent to playing with someone 15ft away from you in a room. This is Dayna’s beautiful tune “Radio-Active Earworm”.
Garbled audio? Echo? Let’s fix that.
Sometimes changing a setting outside of FarPlay fixes audio for our ultra-low-latency audio app FarPlay and regular communications apps like Zoom at the same time. We’ve recently shared two examples.
Do you have a voice student who sounds distorted when they sing online using their Windows PC? Maybe their audio is garbled and their high notes cut out. Fix the problem by turning off signal processing using the video below and this blog post.
Do other people in your calls complain about an echo of themselves when you join with your USB mixer? We explained the fix at FarPlay’s monthly support session Saturday October 26th, 2024. Visit our blog post for details.
Podcast invitation: Accelerate pop vocal coaching with FarPlay
“Radical” Vocal Coach Brad Chapman has worked with platinum artists including Anita Baker, REO Speedwagon, and Whitesnake. Why does Brad teach his students to monitor their singing in headphones in FarPlay? And why do his students use FarPlay with a DAW? To learn why FarPlay is Brad’s secret weapon for getting students studio-ready, join the audience for Brad’s free podcast on Saturday December 7th 11:30am Los Angeles time (2:30pm New York time). Sign up here.
Get in touch
We’ve been loving featuring our amazing users. If you’d like to be included — whether you use FarPlay for lessons, rehearsals, jam sessions, or conversations — we’d love to talk to you. You can let us know by emailing us at contact@farplay.io.
Need help right away? Check out our FAQ & Troubleshooting Guide, which you can open from the Help menu in the latest version of FarPlay. If you haven’t already, upgrade free to the latest version.
If you’d like to ask tech-support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. If you need to reach us privately, email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!
