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Self-Hosted setup for remote music lessons?

Basically, the title. After years of inactivty, I’ll be taking music (cello) lessons again, with my teacher of yesteryear, from whom I’ve moved half a country away.

She has suggested Zoom but is open to alternatives. I don’t particularly like Zoom, plus I have a feeling better quality can be had through a custom solution - but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what exactly would be a good fit for this project.

Maybe Jitsi? Does someone here have experience with it and could tell me if it’s possible to set something like a “target” audio quality?

For hardware, I basically have two options. Both are already in use, for different things, and have sufficient processing capabilities - albeit no GPU:

  • host everything at home. Plus: lowest possible latency from me to the server. Not sure how much that is worth though.
  • root server in the Hetzner cloud: much faster network speed. Again though, not sure how beneficial that is, the ultimate bottleneck will always be my upload speed (40Mbit)

OK, I realize that this post is a but of a random assortment of thoughts. I’d be really happy about suggestions and / or hearing about other’s experiences with similar use-cases!

Max_P ,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

I wish Jitsi was actually good. It’s a pain in the ass to setup and I’ve yet to get anything more than maybe 480p on it across both Firefox and Chome as well as the mobile apps on iOS and Android. It even reports poor internet connection when the server is literally 5ms away over the Internet, so even if it has to fall back to routed traffic I’ve still got a full gigabit of connectivity between me and my server in a datacenter which is way more than enough. None of the open instances I tried were any different either.

It feels like a ridiculously overcomplicated WebRTC demo app, the end performance is essentially identical.

atzanteol ,

You’ll be hard pressed to match Zoom. Audio and video quality are very good. There’s even a mode for musicians, so it won’t try to filter the instrument out as ‘noise’.

eksb ,
@eksb@programming.dev avatar

I tried Jitsi, but was unable to match Zoom’s audio quality.

The difference between Jitsi and Zoom was noticeable, but less important than the difference between the mic built in to the webcam and good mics. I use an SM58 for voice and an SM137 pointed at the cello just below the bridge, through a UMC204HD.

afk_strats ,

I’m not sure if this solves your problem, but it’s an opportunity to plug Jamulus . It’s FOSS, and one of the best solutions if your target is uncompromising sound quality/latency. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do video. I’ve jammed with a band on it and was very successful. Vide was on a phone or separate machine. When we performed, video was mixed by another user using OBS, and streamed on Zoom

IsoKiero ,

Jitsi works, and they have open relays to test with, but as the thing here is very much analog and I’d assume she’d just need to see your position, how hands move etc, the audio quality isn’t the most important thing here. Sure, it helps, but personally I’d just use zoom/teams/hangouts/something readily available and invest in a decent microphone (and audio in general) + camera.

That way you don’t need to provide helpdesk on how to use your thing and waste time from actual lessons nor need to debug server issues while you’ve been scheduled to train with your teacher.

tofubl ,

Tangent, unsolicited:

Music lessons over video call, that has to be a real pain. I can’t find it now, but there’s an Adam Neely video where he talks about why online recording sessions can’t work, as transmission latency works against the immediacy needed to play music together. He said it better than I can.

Except if your idea is to play in turns, but then capturing the thing you want to show… Can’t you find another teacher closer to you?

atzanteol ,

I took lessons over zoom for years, and it works fine. Is not a recording session, you don’t need to play together.

tofubl ,

Well, paint me green and call me a pickle. More power to you if it works. 😊

earth_walker ,
@earth_walker@lemmy.world avatar

Nextcloud may be a bit overkill for your use case, but it does have a very good video chat function. It’s also pretty easy to deploy as a snap package or with the AIO docker image. A downside is that the other person has to have an account on your instance and log into it to join a call. However this is not necessarily difficult to arrange.

paris ,

Consider giving MiroTalk a try. It has several versions but the P2P version would probably be perfect for your scenario. It’s free, runs in your browser, doesn’t need an account, and doesn’t have time limit shenanigans. I’ve used it in lieu of Discord calls before and don’t have any complaints.

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