June 6, 2005
woot
Yay for Apple and the x86 announcement.
So I think it's about time to share info about the new project (for a while
I was unsure if it was going to even be useful, but after this afternoon's
playing with it, I'm completely hooked). It's sort of half multiplayer game,
half music production tool:
Brennan and I are working on software called Ninjam*, which allows a small
group of geographically challenged people to play music together. Because
latency is so important in playing music, existing voice conferencing
over IP really wouldn't work. So instead, we decided to just make latency
bigger, not smaller. Latency in Ninjam is measured in measures, and that's
what makes it interesting. When you play, you're playing along with the
previous intervals of everybody else, and they're playing along with your
previous intervals. If this sounds pretty bizarre, it sort of is, until you
get used to it, then it becomes pretty natural.
We'll go into the architecture of Ninjam soon, and describe some of the
more advanced upcoming features as they get implemented. I suppose this should
actually go on the Ninjam web site, but I'm too lazy as of yet.
Here is a little jam we had today with people from IRC (it comes together
towards the end).
* Perhaps it should be NINJAM:
Novel Interval-based Network Jamming Architecture for Musicians