For such a simple question, you've landed smack on the cutting edge of
technology.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely you'll succeed easily in this endeavor.
Though phone systems may give slightly less delay problems than
internet connections, they experience much of the same delays that you
experience with computer network connections (after all, they're both
fundamentally digital data networks).
While you could certainly dial from one computer 'directly' to the
other (there are standard modem programs that can do this), you'll
then face a number of issues; first, of course, you're paying long
distance for the call. Second, as you note, the audio quality may not
be really good. A phone line is fairly slow for digital data--it's ok
for voice, but for clear audio, there's just not enough bandwidth.
(Higher-bandwidth internet connections such as DSL or Cable would be
better for audio quality. However, with packetized data crossing the
general internet, the latency will likely be even worse. Moreover,
the delay in one direction can be greatly different than the delay in
another, which makes synchronized jamming even harder.)
Some flavors of ISDN, used in digital phone-based videoconferencing,
might be able to guarantee a good enough quality of service to
suffice. ISDN is generally 2 phone lines bonded together for digital
transmission. (It's expensive though, and not available in many
areas).
As for Microsoft Netmeeting, that's an implementation of H.323, the
international protocol used for video and audio conferencing. (There
are actually separate codecs used for compressing and transmitting the
video and audio channels. You'll see audio terms like G.711, vs.
video terms like H.263). The computers on both ends will also add
slightly to the delay, as they decompress and play the audio streams.
There certainly have been experiments of the sort you are suggesting.
A quick search turned up this 'Internet concert' from 1998, which,
among other performances, included A violinist in Warsaw, a cellist in
Oslo and a viola player in Helsinki:
http://www.notam02.no/warsaw/program.html
http://www.notam02.no/warsaw/melange.html
But even professional musician collaboration services using DigiDesign
ProTools such as those offered by StudioCats
(http://www.studiocats.com/ ) are not 'real time'.
It's conceivable that if you were doing Midi sequencing, or similar
work with ProTools, that you could get a better connection by dialing
the other computer and then sending only the Midi information (i.e.
don't output analog waveforms that is then compressed and sampled into
G.711).
I'm not very familiar with ProTools, so I'm leaving this as a comment,
just noting that 1) delay is always going to be a factor, you just
want to minimize it as much as possible (including by sending the
minimum amount of data needed), and 2) Netmeeting is unlikely to do
you any favors on a low-bandwidth phone connection.
Hope this helps,
Duncan2-ga |
