Author: David Liao

Today, we’re introducing a new FarPlay tier. Ever since we introduced recording, we’ve had a recurring request from teachers. Many of you would like for your students, who may not have a subscription, to be able to record their sessions. FarPlay For Teachers allows this and more. Compare plans at our pricing page.

In addition to letting students record without subscriptions, this new subscription plan allows you to create up to 10 Personal Meeting Rooms. To enable full support for these new features, upgrade to FarPlay 1.2.5, out today. FarPlay For Teachers also features the same attentive support you’ve come to know through our Standard and Standard+ subscriptions.

All participants can record multitrack audio and video in sessions created by FarPlay For Teachers subscribers. Teachers no longer need to remember to make recordings for their students: teachers can leave it up to students to record their lessons.

Also, with a subscription to FarPlay For Teachers, you can create up to 10 Personal Meeting Rooms.

How will you keep track of so many rooms? Standard and Standard+ subscribers (who continue to be able to create 1 Personal Meeting Room) and FarPlay For Teachers subscribers can now give their meeting rooms any names they like–yes, even with emojis 🥳🎵!

Next monthly tech support session: Feb 18

Thanks to everyone who came to our fourth monthly tech support session on January 7th. Watch our highlights reel to listen to pianist and author Annik LaFarge explain how FarPlay is great for lessons and to enjoy Martin Waugh’s improvisation from Scotland with our own Dan Tepfer, in Brooklyn, over 3200 miles away!

If you’d like to join us, sign up for our next session, Sunday February 18th 2pm–3:30pm New York time (8pm–9:30pm Central European time). Monthly tech support sessions are available at no extra cost to paid subscribers. 

Early Music America features FarPlay

We’re proud to be featured this month in EMAg, the magazine of Early Music America. World-renowned classical vocalist and acoustic vocal pedagogy researcher Ian Howell argues that we don’t have to make music exclusively in person (or exclusively online) – “we can pick the solution that is financially, logistically, and artistically preferable on a case-by-case basis.” He writes, “today there are low-latency apps, like FarPlay, where it seems like you’re in the same room. I use these apps every day as a voice teacher and coach, and it is amazing.” Dr. Howell’s latest book is Advice for Young Musicians.

Research opportunity at Northwestern U.

You’re invited to share your experiences using FarPlay in a research study! Seth Adams, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, is seeking English-speaking participants with 25+ hours of experience making music with others using FarPlay or other apps. Each participant will sit for a single interview conducted online. To learn more, please contact Seth at seth.m.adams@u.northwestern.edu.

Spread the word about FarPlay

We are a small company. Four people make up the core of our team: Dan Tepfer, Anton Runov, Martyna Goralska, and yours truly. We rely heavily on word of mouth to grow, and we invite you to share how you use FarPlay and to tag us at @farplayapp on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter.

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. For 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 enjoy FarPlay 1.2.5 and FarPlay For Teachers!

 —David Liao & the FarPlay team

FarPlay just got even easier to use. We’re thrilled to release FarPlay 1.2.4 today, which provides an input mixer, a waiting room, and invitation links, as well as other design improvements. Upgrade here. Upgrading is always free!

Input mixer

This release introduces an input mixer, which makes it easy to bring audio from three or more inputs on your audio interface into a FarPlay session. The mixer is available to all users.

Open the mixer by using the Channels: pull-down menu to select Mixer.

Add tracks and adjust gains and pans to create a custom mix. For details, see our mixer page.

Waiting Room

Version 1.2.4 provides a Waiting Room for Personal Meeting Rooms (for subscribers). This is great for teachers who want to prevent the next lesson’s student from interrupting the current lesson.

In your Personal Meeting Room, click the open padlock to lock your session, which sends participants to the Waiting Room when they arrive.

The Waiting Room lets you individually admit participants to your session.

To learn more about the Waiting Room, visit our step-by-step instructions.

Invitation links

FarPlay 1.2.4 introduces invitation links. Just click the link to join the session! You no longer need to paste Session IDs.

To invite participants to an active session, click Invite and choose Copy Invitation Link. Share your invitation link (for example, using text messages and emails).

For sessions you create in free mode, the Invite button is disabled once you and one other participant are in the session. To create sessions with more users, subscribe.

Get in touch

If you’d like to be featured and share how you use FarPlay — whether it be 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. For tech support questions, our forum is the fastest way to reach us. Thank you to those who’ve started using the forum. If you need to reach us privately, email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!

We hope you enjoy FarPlay 1.2.4!

 —David Liao & the FarPlay team

We’re thrilled to release FarPlay 1.2.3 today, which provides two new important features—screen sharing and automatic adjustment of video layout. Upgrade here. Upgrading is always free! Today, we’re also formally announcing our tech support forum.

Screen sharing

This release provides a feature many of our users have asked for: built-in screen sharing, which is available for all users. Screen sharing is useful for sharing sheet music and walking friends through FarPlay features.

To get started, click the Camera icon in a video chat and choose Share desktop screen. For details, see our step-by-step instructions!

Automatic adjustment of video layout

Version 1.2.3 automatically readjusts the layout of participant videos as the video chat window is resized. It’s no longer necessary to click the Cycle layouts button to switch between layouts manually, so we’ve removed this button, cleaning up the video session interface.

Support forum

One of the things that makes working at FarPlay a joy is our enthusiastic user community. We’re delighted to unveil our new support forum, which you can always visit by clicking the Forum button in the navigation menu at farplay.io.

Use the Search feature to find answers to your questions—we’ve pre-populated the forum with an extended FAQ with nearly 100 answered questions so you can find answers to many of your questions right away!

To sign in to ask tech questions, click the Log in button. We — or other FarPlay users — will answer as soon as we can.

We are still here to answer your questions. We’re moving tech support to the forum as much as we can to create a public record so that an answer that helps one user helps other users with the same question.

Get in touch

If you’d like to be featured and share how you use FarPlay — whether it be 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. For tech support questions, our forum, announced above, 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 enjoy FarPlay 1.2.3 and the forum!

 —David Liao & the FarPlay team

We’re excited to release FarPlay 1.2.1 today, which provides two new important features—combined video recording for Standard and Standard+ subscribers and cleaner audio from users with limited upload capacity. Upgrade here. Upgrading is always free.

Combined video recordings for Standard and Standard+ subscribers

This release provides combined video recording for Standard and Standard+ subscribers. Combined video displays individual video feeds from multiple participants in a single view. Available export resolutions for combined video include resolutions ideal for social media—be sure to mention us @farplayapp when you post your recordings! Standard+ subscribers also get a separate video recording for each participant in a recorded video chat, maximizing flexibility for video editing.

To get started, go to the Tools section and click Start Recording. Choose record multitrack video (for Standard+ subscribers) or record mix video (for Standard subscribers). Learn more about video recording using our step-by-step instructions.

Video recording is just one of the benefits of our upgrade from legacy video to our current video engine, which we introduced with FarPlay 1.0.7. Support for legacy video is ending soon—another good reason to upgrade (for free!).

Audio sent by users with poor upload performance is cleaner

Version 1.2.1 makes it possible to enjoy clean audio under some network conditions that produced particularly crackly audio when using previous versions. This should reduce some of the crackling that is noticeable in audio received from users with limited upload capacity. This improvement is accomplished by automatically adjusting the size of the audio packets that each participant transmits. We remain committed to supporting a wider range of network conditions.

For details, visit our updated tutorial on latency.

Getting in touch

You can still sign up for the first of our monthly tech support sessions, which takes place Sunday, September 17 2pm–3:30pm New York time (8pm–9:30pm Central Europe time). If you’d like to be featured and share how you use FarPlay — whether it be for lessons, rehearsals, jam sessions, or conversations — we’d love to talk to you. You can let us know by simply answering this email. If there’s any question we can help you with, please email us at support@farplay.io — we’re happy to help!

We hope you enjoy FarPlay 1.2.1!

 —David Liao (FarPlay’s director of communications)

We’re thrilled to release FarPlay 1.2, a major update that works over a wider range of connections, makes it easier to manage latency, and lets Standard+ subscribers record multitrack video.

Works with a wider range of connections

From the very beginning, FarPlay has been great for making music with the best latencies possible over Ethernet connections. This isn’t changing, but now, with version 1.2, FarPlay also gives you the best latency that a connection can give you even when you’re using a less stable connection. This is great for having natural conversations over Wi-Fi! This new flexibility is thanks to major improvements under the hood to the way FarPlay manages latency.

Improved user interface for managing latency

One of the features that has made FarPlay so easy to use is the latency slider, which lets you find the balance between latency and audio glitching (or static) that sounds best to your ears. Version 1.2 makes the latency slider even easier to use: in Auto latency mode, the green bar that shows you the recommended range of slider settings now zooms in to fill the slider. This is more intuitive, and guarantees that any slider position you select in Auto mode gives you a recommended balance between latency and static.

According to the balance between latency and audio glitching you choose, FarPlay now also tunes the Auto latency adjustment parameters that are used to provide a consistent experience while network conditions change. In Auto latency mode, drag the latency slider to the right to prioritize clean audio (FarPlay tries to keep buffering latency high for a longer amount of time after a burst of network instability), and drag the latency slider to the left to prioritize the lowest possible latency (FarPlay tries to reduce buffering latency quickly after a burst of network instability).

It’s easy to learn what you can do with the latency slider: just click the latency slider information button ⓘ to open FarPlay’s new built-in illustrated instructions! To learn more about what causes latency and how FarPlay helps you manage it, visit our expanded tutorial on latency.

Record multitrack video (beta)

Standard+ subscribers can use multitrack video recording, a major feature that we’re introducing in beta. This feature exports a separate .mp4 video file for each video channel (convenient for video editing!). Use this feature by clicking Start Recording in the Tools section of the main FarPlay window and then choosing “record multitrack video (beta).” For more details, go to our step-by-step instructions.

We hope you enjoy this update. If there’s any question we can help you with, please email us at support@farplay.io—we’re excited to help!

—David