Cedar is Zoom for musicians. Zero latency. No click track. Just play!
- Create a Cedar room, and invite your musician friends.
- Organize musicians in the Cedar chain.
- Perform live together over the internet!
- ✅ Perform and/or rehearse live with musicians anywhere you can have an internet connection.
- ✅ Mix room audio in real time.
- ⬜ Download recordings made in the Cedar room.
- ⬜ Stream multiple tracks for each musician.
- ⬜ Chat via voice and text.
- ⬜ Play an audio file or metronome as a track.
There are several approaches to online musical collaboration already:
- Record everyone separately at different times, then mix them together in editing software. A popular example of this is the Hamilton cast Zoom performance.
- Send audio data between all musicians as fast as possible, such as what is possible with JamKazam.
- Synchronize musicians to a specific meter, and play with the other musician's previous iteration through the set loop, such as with Jamtaba.
However, each has a set of drawbacks:
- Recording musicians at different times by nature does not support live performance or rehearsals.
- Latency is a big hurdle to overcome when trying to send data to everyone as fast as possible and is often insurmountable (more on that in the "How it works" section).
- This requires a metronome and limits song structure choice--i.e., this is only suitable for music that repeats over a set interval.
I encourage everyone to use the tool that is right for them, but for me, I found the current options didn't allow me to make music with my friends the way I wanted to--live with zero latency and no click track. Therefore, I built Cedar to make this possible; the next section explains how.
Using Cedar will be familiar to anyone who has used a video conferencing app like Zoom or a VoIP app like Discord: Open up a virtual room for your activity--in this case, playing music together--and invite people in. But what sets Cedar apart is that it achieves zero latency in musical performance without requiring a click track. That is where the Cedar musician chain comes in.
Most video conferencing and live music performance/jamming applications send audio data between all participants as fast as possible--or at least fast enough that the latency is largely unnoticeable. Unfortunately, there are two big problems with this approach:
- The human ear can distinguish audio latency down to about 10-15 ms.
- The speed of light is 300,000 km/s.
As an example, if I live in Boston, and I want to play music with my friend in Seattle, my audio data has to travel to him and his to me, ~4,000 km each way. Assuming data travels at the speed of light, the data will take ~13 ms to travel each leg of the journey. If my friend plays perfectly in-sync with what he hears me playing, then what I hear is him playing along to what I played two-times ~13 ms ago, which works out to ~27 ms. That is well above the threshold where the human ear can start to distinguish latency and is thus a non-starter for a live performance scenario and, in my opinion, rehearsal scenarios.
NOTE: The above scenario is the ideal case; in reality, as of writing, the round trip time between Boston and Seattle is ~70 ms according to WonderNetwork, which is well beyond the 10-15 ms limit. In fact, the only cities within that limit are less than 600 km from Boston, which is pretty much just the United States' North East.
All that to say, while Cedar doesn't solve the problem of how annoyingly slow light can be, it doesn't attempt to send data to every musician from every musician simultaneously. Instead, musicians are conceptually arranged in a chain, where one person lays down the base track, and each subsequent musician, in turn, hears a mix of all previous musicians and adds their own audio to the music chain. The result of this arrangement is that latency becomes a non-issue, and musicians can perform together in real time.
Cedar is completely free and open source--you can use my app and my code in pretty much any way you want. I made it this way by design because I want Cedar to be available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. This is why I have a Patreon (temporarily disabled). It allows me to realize my vision for the project without putting the app behind a paywall or subscription or flooding it with ads. In other words, musicians are enabled to work with Cedar creatively, and I am incentivized to create a valuable product. Your money helps me pay the costs of running the Cedar service and buys me more time to work on the project.
See the Cedar guide for information on how to use Cedar.
Cedar is composed of two main modules: an API server (Feathers with a Redis backend) and a client (Electron running a React app). See the "Getting started" section of each of the modules for information on how to start running the modules locally.