Can we use voip for choir practice while isolated/social distancing? - This would be multi-party, 30-100 voices simultaneously, sufficiently low latency for singing together (maybe <100ms) all located within a 10km radius.
Ideally the members would be using PCs, IOS and android devices (might be possible with 3CX as there are IOSAndroid clients)
or with Asterix on a local linux server, maybe only members with PCs might be supported.
There are many choirs that are desperate to sing together while isolated over the next months, and the usual solutions including video (Zoom, Facetime, Skype) have too much latency (~>500ms in my experience. I understand that quality may suffer, but it would still be valuable to many.
From a theoretical standpoint, the hardest part about that would be the audio mixing for all 100 voices. Typically an audio mixer in a conference bridge only mixes the audio from the few loudest voices in the conference bridge, so that all the quiet sounds across all the channels don’t get passed around to all the other participants.
Thank you, that’s a very good point. I understand that Zoom can override this feature, called “enable original sound” which bypasses audio processing such as background noise suppression. This would probably suit my purpose if network delays were small and bandwidth high, but my experiments to date show too much latency as expected.