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We’re getting ready to share some exciting news about FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of musicians who use FarPlay. Thanks to all of our users who’ve helped us test FarPlay Meet so far. Meet remains in invitation-only testing. To join the waitlist, reply to this newsletter!

Over 1000 miles, as the “Songbird” flies

So cool to see vocal coach Stephannie Moore, in Florida, sharing this clip from a lesson with Lily, in Connecticut — over 1,000 miles apart! Thanks to the real-time accompaniment and immediate feedback made possible by FarPlay, they’re able to workshop Fleetwood Mac’s “Songbird” just as effectively as if they were in the same room.

Dr. Stephannie Moore ⁨works with students across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia. She’s also a clinical researcher who specializes in preventing and rehabilitating singing voice injuries. Lily Farrell is a theatre major at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Turn VPN off to fix blurry video and high latency

Getting murky video? Unusually high latency? Make sure everyone uses an Ethernet cable to connect their computer to the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters the home. Avoid wireless repeater/extender routers and Ethernet-over-power adapters. Ask everyone to turn their computer’s Wi-Fi off. If that doesn’t fix the problem, have everyone turn VPN off, as attendees found out at our June support session. Learn more at our blog.

Interested in live tech support? Signups are still open for this month’s support session on Saturday, July 19th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Our following session will be Saturday, August 23rd 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.

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!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Getting murky or blocky video? Is latency unusually high? Make sure everyone uses an Ethernet cable to connect their computer to the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters the home. Avoid wireless repeater/extender routers and Ethernet-over-power adapters. Ask everyone to turn their computer’s Wi-Fi off. If that doesn’t fix the problem, have everyone turn VPN off, as attendees of our monthly support session Sunday, June 29th, 2025 found out.

Turning VPN off just takes a few clicks:

• In macOS Ventura and later, click the Apple menu, then System Settings. In the sidebar at the left, click VPN. If there’s any VPN that is “Connected”, flick its switch to the off position.
• In macOS Monterey and earlier, click the Apple menu, then System Preferences. Go to Network. If the list of network services at the left shows that any VPN is “Connected”, click on that VPN and click its Disconnect button.
• On Windows PCs, click Start > Settings > Network & Internet > VPN. Look through the list of VPNs on the right. If you find a VPN listed as “Connected”, click its Disconnect button.
• If you’ve installed separate VPN or security software, look for the software’s icon in the menu bar at the top of the screen on a Mac or in the System Tray at the bottom of the screen on a Windows PC. Click the application’s icon to look for its VPN-off switch.

—David

We’re thrilled to say hello to so many new subscribers! Looking for users to try FarPlay with? We think you’ll love FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. Meet remains in invitation-only testing. To join the waitlist, reply to this newsletter!

The Gomalan Brass Quintet rehearses on FarPlay!

Here, for the first time, all five brass players rehearse together in real time from the Italian cities of Genoa, Turin, Parma, and Reggio Emilia, across 150 miles! They’re performing a stirring rendition of the Triumphal March from Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, a fitting way to announce their arrival on FarPlay. Bravi!

Spice things up with backing tracks

Your student on FarPlay can play along with a backing track on YouTube on your computer! Simply bring system audio into your FarPlay session with our Input Mixer. See how violin teacher Laurel Thomsen got set up in minutes in the video highlight below from our May support session.

Interested in live tech support? Signups are still open for this month’s support session on Sunday, June 29th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time. Our following session will be Saturday, July 19th 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.

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!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

It’s been great to see so many of you on FarPlay Meet, our platform that lets you connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. Meet remains in invitation-only testing. Interested in joining the waitlist? Reply to this newsletter to let us know!

Feel the Groove with Mango Mindset

We’re excited to have Johann Hagerer, Cataldo Mocciaro, and Holger Rauhut return to our newsletter. Here, their band, Mango Mindset, is performing Holger’s cool “Seven Days of Snow”, with lyrics from Syd Barrett’s “Effervescing Elephant”, live over FarPlay from two separate locations in Munich. The song’s complex 7/4 time signature was no problem, thanks to FarPlay’s rock-bottom latency.

Easily transfer pan and gain settings to another computer

You’ve adjusted pan and gain settings for your ensemble just the way you like, but now you want to install FarPlay on another computer. Does this mean adjusting pan and gain settings for your ensemble all over again? No. FarPlay lets you save and load files containing pan and gain settings. To use these options, click the Session menu and open the Multi-User Session Options submenu, as described in the video below and our multi-user session instructions.

This video is just one of the highlights from our recent monthly support sessions. You’re invited to join one of our monthly sessions below.

• Saturday, May 31st 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time
• Sunday, June 29th 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8:00pm-9:30pm Central European time

Signups are still open for the session on May 31st. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers and students of FarPlay For Teachers 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 bustling 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’ve been working hard on our next release and testing our upcoming FarPlay Meet platform, which will allow you to connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. Meet is in invitation-only testing. Interested? Reply to this newsletter to join the waitlist to test Meet!

Easy fix: FarPlay 1.3.1 crashes on Windows (rare)

FarPlay crashed for a small number of Windows users after upgrading to version 1.3.1. If FarPlay 1.3.1 crashes on your Windows PC, simply download and run this installer from Microsoft to update components of Windows FarPlay requires. Thanks to everyone who reported the problem and tested the fix!

Venus Leone & Diego Morales perform together over FarPlay

Performing artist, multi-lingual accent coach, and sound engineer Venus Leone sang from Los Angeles, and guitarist, composer, and producer Diego Morales played guitar and his instrumental track from Zurich, Switzerland. When they performed her sultry song Besame together over FarPlay, Venus felt “like he was playing in the other room!” Besame is Venus’s entry for this year’s NPR Tiny Desk Contest. We hope you make it to Tiny Desk!

Getting started with FarPlay

Want to show a student or band member how to get started with FarPlay? Send them this six-minute video, which walks them through the simplest setup we’ve found.

The simplest way to make music together with FarPlay is to plug wired headphones with a mic (like wired Apple EarPods) into your computer and to use an Ethernet cable to connect your computer to the router that receives the internet signal where it first enters your home. If your computer doesn’t have an Ethernet port, use an Ethernet adapter for USB-C or USB-A. Sharing these recommendations is easy with our personalizable template.

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. Our next monthly support session is Wednesday, April 30th 12:00pm-1:30pm New York time (6:00pm-7:30pm 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 1.3.1!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

Dear FarPlay Community,

We want to extend our sincerest apologies for the service interruption that occurred yesterday. We understand how disruptive and frustrating downtime can be—including for those of you who rely on FarPlay to teach and perform music professionally.

The outage affected the FarPlay app, website, and email and was due to an error at one of our service providers. Service was restored at 8pm New York time. 

Thanks to everyone for your patience while we fixed this issue. Making sure that FarPlay always provides an open avenue of communication is our top priority, and we’re working to make sure this never happens again.

We know many of our subscribers rely on FarPlay for their professions. For those of you impacted, please reach out to us via support@farplay.io, and we’ll arrange appropriate credits.

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

Sincerely,
David Liao & the FarPlay team

Thanks to your feedback, FarPlay 1.3.1, out now, introduces accessibility and usability improvements including audible entrance/departure notifications, the option to show/hide messages from previous chats, and more. FarPlay now automatically reconnects after interruptions to network connectivity. We also fixed a bug that prevented FarPlay from saving changes to the number of channels you send. Upgrade for free here.

One more thing: this release also adds support for our upcoming FarPlay Meet platform, which will allow you to connect with the wider community of FarPlay users. For now, we will be granting access to Meet on an invitation-only basis, but we’re very excited to bring this to the community at large soon. Stay tuned!

Hide messages from previous chats

Since its introduction with FarPlay 1.1, the Chat window has displayed messages from the current session and previous sessions — great for reviewing rehearsal notes. With version 1.3.1, you can now hide messages from previous sessions. Simply uncheck “Show messages from previous sessions” in the Chat window. Learn more about chat in our Tips and Tricks.

Audible notifications for entrances and departures

Starting with version 1.3.1, FarPlay can play audible notifications when someone joins or leaves a session. To turn audible notifications on/off and adjust their volume, go to the Advanced tab in the Preferences window. For details, visit our accessibility page.

Mute yourself using the keyboard

Muting and unmuting yourself is even easier. You can still click the mute button, but now, you can also press Option-Command-M on Macs or Control+Alt+M in Windows. For a list of FarPlay’s keyboard shortcuts, go to our accessibility page.

Active-video badge

Find yourself reminding participants to start video? You’ll love this feature. When a participant is in the video chat, a badge now appears to call attention to the Video button for participants who haven’t started video. Learn more about using video here.

Better handling of network interruptions

This release improves handling of interruptions to your internet connection. When you get disconnected from a session, FarPlay now automatically reconnects to the session. On rare occasion, previous versions of FarPlay would get stuck connecting to a session after switching networks (for example, from Wi-Fi to Ethernet). This is now fixed too.

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, March 22nd 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time (7:00pm-8:30pm Central European time). Sign up here. Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to paid subscribers.

We hope you enjoy FarPlay 1.3.1!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

During your FarPlay session, the other musicians are well balanced in your headphones. But when you listen to the recorded mix afterwards, some musicians are too loud and others are too soft.

Is there a solution?

The fix is easy, as we explained at FarPlay’s monthly support session on Saturday February 22nd, 2025. Check out the video below.

• Go to Preferences (by clicking the gear icon, using the FarPlay menu on Macs, or clicking Menu on Windows PCs). Go to the Recording tab.
• Check both the “Apply volume monitor gains when recording a mix” and “Apply monitor panning when recording a multi-user mix” checkboxes. Press OK.

Mix .wav files you record will now use gain and pan adjustments from your session. If the other musicians you play with sound balanced in your headphones during a session, they’ll sound balanced in the mix recording too.

To learn more about making recordings in FarPlay, check out our recording instructions.

—David

Our next release is just around the corner. In the meantime, enjoy performances from World Gone Crazy and Mango Mindset, find out whether you really need to use Ethernet, and check out our schedule of upcoming monthly support sessions.

“Brady Come Back!”

World Gone Crazy is “Stand Up with A Rock-n-Roll Soundtrack”. How does New England’s premiere comedy band rehearse comedic timing and music from three states? FarPlay. Gary Marino writes, “After the years of trying, World Gone Crazy finally pulled off a real time online rehearsal.” Check out their epic parody of Player’s 1977 “Baby Come Back!” below.

This Sonnet Slaps!

You can really feel the tight groove in Mango Mindset‘s rendition of “This Here” by Bobby Timmons with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 27. The band performed this piece live from two separate locations in Munich. Holger Rauhut explains, “Although we live in the same city, we often use FarPlay to rehearse because it is much less effort. We don’t need to carry around and set up the drums or electric piano.”

Do you really need to connect to Ethernet to use FarPlay?

This is a question we get a lot. If you’re using FarPlay to teach lessons, for example, and you’re not planning on playing tight rhythmic music together with your student, then Wi-Fi works great, and you’ll still be able to enjoy FarPlay’s studio-quality sound, bidirectional audio, and low latency. FarPlay co-founder Dan Tepfer teaches frequently with FarPlay over Wi-Fi.

If, on the other hand, you want the full magic that FarPlay can offer — the experience of playing music with others with such rock-bottom latency that it feels like you’re in the same room — then connecting to Ethernet, for all participants, is the only sure way to achieve this at this time. There are ongoing developments in Wi-Fi and cellular connections, like Wi-Fi 7, that may change this equation, but for now, Ethernet is the way to go. Learn more in our recent blog post.

Monthly Support Sessions

Since we started our support sessions in 2023, we’ve been thrilled to help our users get started with FarPlay, minimize latency, bring backing tracks and talkback mics into their sessions, and more. Check out our playlist of support-session highlights.

Want in on the fun? Come to one of our monthly sessions below. Sign ups are open for the session on February 22nd.

• Saturday, February 22nd 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 8pm-9:30pm Central European time
• Saturday, March 22nd 2:00pm-3:30pm New York time / 7pm-8:30pm Central European time

Monthly tech-support sessions are available free to 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!

—David Liao & the FarPlay team

When you join a video chat in FarPlay, you can make the video window as large as the screen. But what if this hides the main FarPlay window? Find the main window again using the View menu, as shown in the video below.

You can also bring up the main window using a keyboard shortcut (Command-1 on Macs and Control+1 on Windows PCs). For a list of FarPlay’s keyboard shortcuts, visit our accessibility page.

—David Liao