Jamming online in real-time is possible only between participants in the same city or district. It all boils down to internet-induced latency. More than 20ms and no real-time is possible. For long distance (high latency) online jamming, there is Ninjam [1], developed by Cockos, creators of Reaper DAW, where latency is actually expanded to match a musical division (bar), so everyone can jam in non-realtime but still musically correct.

For long distance collaboration and recording (not jamming), I'm currently working on developing a Reaper + Sonobus (which uses AOO) solution which I named ReaConnect [0].

[0] https://github.com/AtmanActive/ReaConnect

[1] https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

With good hardware and a stable system you should be able to get the harware latency down to 2-5 ms. Then everybody needs a very stable and fast internet connection with low jitter, so you get average ping times of 20 ms or less. On top of that you have a jitter buffer latency of maybe 20 ms or less. (If you're very far apart geographically, you also need to consider the speed of light for the network transmission.) Under ideal circumstances you may end up with a total end-to-end latency of 30 ms. This is the same latency you get when standing 10 meters apart on a large stage. You probably won't be able to play bebop or technical death metal, but pop ballads or stoner rock should be feasable :)

> How does this compare to Roc, if you've looked at it?

Strangely, I haven't heard of Roc, thanks! Looks neat, albeit a bit minimal. AOO seems to have more features. Most importantly, it has an (optional) connection server to facilitate peer-to-peer streaming over the internet, but there are also many little things like stream metadata, embedded stream messages, event handling, etc. Some of these are very useful or even essential for online jamming applications, for example. (https://sonobus.net/ uses AOO under the hood.)

> Would it be possible to have pulse/pipewire sink/source examples to quickly get started on desktop?

ATM, there are only portaudio examples (https://git.iem.at/aoo/aoo/-/tree/master/examples/cpp), but they should translate easily to pulse/pipewire.

Hi, nice to see you here :)

> Have you tried AOO on embedded platforms e.g. Bela, RPi?

Yes, AOO also works on embedded platforms! I managed to run AOO on the Olimex ESP32-ADF board (https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-ADF/open-sou...) to build low-cost wireless speakers that can be played directly from Pd or SC. With two cores @ 240 MHz, the ESP32 is not exactly a powerful chip :) Bela or RPi is no problem at all.

> Would you consider supporting bindings to other langs, e.g. Python?

Actually, that has been on my mind. C# and Java might also be worthwhile, in particular for mobile devices. I don't think I will have the time to do it myself in the near future, but if someone's interested in creating langauge bindings, I'm happy to assist! Since AOO also has a plain C interface, it shouldn't be a big deal.

EDIT: the IIL looks amazing btw!

They claim it will work on an ESP32. If it fits and runs decently there it will be nothing an RPi or Bela.

Thanks!

> Is there anything to stop it being used for video frames as well as audio?

Generally, the library is aimed at audio applications and follows the typical model of audio plugins: there is a process() function that takes an array of audio buffers and is called by the host application in the audio callback.

That being said, you could abuse the so-called "stream message" feature to embed images resp. video frames in the audio stream, but I'm not sure how practical that would be... Someone should try it :)

> Any war stories or interesting projects using it?

Check out the section "Use cases" in my article: https://www.soundingfuture.com/en/article/aoo-low-latency-pe...