Not taking anything away from the free product, it looks like a nice UI (using JUCE) on top of AoO [1] (Audio over OSC, the peer-to-peer audio part).

[1] https://github.com/essej/aoo

Hey, original author of AoO here. Don't underestimate the value of good UI design! Also, Sonobus offers a few additional goodies, such as mixing/routing, FX, recording to disk, etc. IMO, jesse does a fantastic job.

Definately. It seems like I've only been able to get friends with engineering degrees to operate something like JackTrip. But SonoBus I can get regular musicians to use.

"Part of the myth is thinking that packaging is technology. [...] Microsoft Windows is packaging and conventions. The Macintosh is packaging and conventions. The World Wide Web is packaging and conventions. Underneath these wrappers are the real technologies: TCP/IP, DNS, graphical displays, [...] compression, payment mechanisms, encryption, and so on, but the wrapper is what people see." -Ted Nelson [1]

that being said, this is one bit of “packaging” im particularly grateful for -- by complete coincidence, i found it a few days ago, and the fact that the app is free* and available everywhere means i can finally use my phone as an audio receiver for any computer†. now i can listen to talks with slides on a big screen while i cook or clean at antisocial hours, and let the rest of the house sleep without having to buy a bluetooth DAC (or a pair of wireless headphones‡)

actually kind of funny -- other solutions to this exist on ios but they are in fact paid apps. same goes for various bits of “packaging” that solve similarly trivial problems, which was a part of growing up with apple stuff that was always deeply insulting to me. i recently came across someone singing the praises of a safari extension for user styles. it is two dollars and ninety nine cents on the mac app store. christ. i hope the grift goes well for the author, we've all got to get by somehow, but good fucking lord

* actually free, as in no strings attached, open source, not freemium adware, not sending 24kbps opus of everything that goes through it to some adtech firm's speech recognition neural net

† ive janked together things like an icecast instance -> mobile safari before, but good lord the latency is ass

‡ headphones are such amazing consumer tech. they do not go bad by default. cans from the 80s sound just as good in 2022. wireless headphones throw this out the window and slap an expiration date on. i categorically object on principle

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

I'll the contrarian stance. Through a certain lens, packaging is technology, technology is packaging. The two are indistinguishable.

TCP/IP is merely a given package of conventions around how bytes should be ordered. Compression even more so! Encryption is likewise just a set of conventions and packaging around how to transmit bytes. So on and so forth.

In the physical domain this holds true as well. Any given piece of physical equipment is merely a packaging and rearrangement of other physical components together.

Okay so what's the upshot of all this besides word games? By thinking of technology as simply packaging, we can reuse a lot of the prior work that people use to create packaging in how we think about technology as well as explain a lot of technological trends by analogy with how packaging works. We also should realize the opposite direction as well: a lot of packaging concerns are fundamentally the same as technological concerns and many similar trade-offs are made.

i am in full agreement that, for instance, a shell script consisting of grep piped into sed is as deserving of being called a “program” as grep and sed themselves are

it does come down to where you draw the line, though -- is a PaaS subscription plan technology? not the infra behind PaaS firm's epic load balancer that lets them provision leanly and fatten their margins. not the javascript minifier that does its damned best to cut down time from link clicked to prices and features in browser viewport with animated gradients in background. not even the spreadsheet from the accountant who drafted up expected returns across a range of pricing schemes. but the subscription plan itself. that thing, which we conveniently refer to as a package pretty often. is it also technology?

> is it also technology?

In a very meaningful way yes! Business plans are a form of incentive bundling, which is itself an example of a social technology and social technologies are a thing and they follow much the same lifecycle and trade-offs as any other non-social technology. Indeed we can derive a lot of useful insights by using insights derived from looking at social technologies to examine non-social technologies and vice versa.

turtles all the way down?

I recently made a P2P audio broadcast app, also HD quality, and low latency, and it runs in all major browsers, including mobile, no app download. It also supports listener call-ins, and music/file streaming in the mix. What should I do with this technology?

Open source it, so I can see if it's a good home for some of MY ideas in a lowest-possible-latency audio over lossy network R&D/code I've been half-ass building for a decade now. ;-)

Though perhaps not, as I'm guessing making it browser based and cross platform removes the ability to do lots of the things that drive down latency.

My stock assumption is that most people will have perfectly adequate network bandwidth for good quality audio streaming. Most of connected world already does. My mobile to mobile tests have been as good I as could want.

Then I look forward to our future friendly rivalry, and topping all quantitative benchmarks. ;-)

(I'm not going after exactly your space, though maybe a superset of it)

WebRTC is already pretty good.

Selfishly let me use it to run the live call-in podcast that I have wanted to run for a long time :-)

I'm not prepared for testing and debugging at real-world breadth!

haha, I hear you on that. I hope one day you will be and wish you the best :-)

I think it is insulting that Bluetooth basically gave up on this. It is faster to send an audio signal around the planet once than to send it from your phone to your ear with the worst Bluetooth profile.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148527

Can this interoperate with AVB? Are there plans for that? Gadgets like this look promising:

https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/spk-4p-...

Technically, yes, it can interop with AVB. Might require budget though.

The Features/Tips/User Guide/Download header is slightly broken. The Features anchor appends a fragment to the current URL, which produces .../linux.html#features on the Linux download page.

How does it compare to Jamulus for remote jam session use case?

I'm not the developer, but he (Jesse) spoke in my class over a year ago. So hopefully I'm conveying this correctly -- my impression is he felt it was pretty close for live jamming but depends on a lot of conditions (ping latency, ethernet vs wifi, how many people are in the session). But what I can say for sure is it makes conversations feel a lot more intimate.

That’s what Jamulus does, too.

jamulus is positioned as a 21st century take on the conference call jam session; it has a vaguely skeuomorphic mixer like you'd see in a DAW and so on. sonobus on the other hand is a lot more application-agnostic in its presentation

Both are highly sensitive to latency

Ninjam/jamtaba on the other hand is not

Ninjam is a neat idea, but it's not really a realtime audio streaming solution (audio is delayed by a whole bar, iirc)

Wouldn't this name be a copyright infringement given it's for high quality audio streaming?

I'm guessing you mean trademark, not copyright -- copyright does not make sense in the context used -- but I'm not sure why you think it would be trademark infringement.

My guess is they are referring to the similarity between the name Sonos and SonoBus.

Absolutely. Almost certainly problematic as one of Sonus’ leading value props is exactly this function - audio sync across their ecosystem.

if they want to keep it, they should come up with a viable long term business model, because obsoleting hardware isn't it. otherwise their threat hopefully will vaporize eventually, along with their non-ip stranglehold.

perhaps they meant something like “hmm, couldnt streaming copyrighted music using this app constitute a violation of rightsholders' intellectual property?”, which, on the one hand: haha; on the other hand: lmao

I was about to write a comment about how I'm not supporting a company that ruined by Google Home speaker group functionality so yeah I think Sonos would have a pretty good trademark infringement case here.