Ask HN: Video conferencing that works with group singing?

Unfortunately that will be really tough. I have a live audio background and the recommendation I have always heard is to keep the latency of your signal path at the 1 ms level when dealing with monitoring applications. That's a solid order of magnitude below what is common for VOIP let alone video. You could maybe get away with audio only, but round trip latency is still getting up there.

Edit: I know of some pro-grade point to point audio solutions that are able to handle this problem, but I'm unsure if there's anything consumer ready.

One way is achieving low latency, which is technically super hard, as others point out. Keep in mind that another way is selecting less latency sensitive music, "slower" music with longer held tones. But that's a style change.

I just spoke to a friend regarding your issue, they said at their company they ran into a similar situation.

Their solution was to use Zoom Video Conferencing, apparently they have the option to have users phone in or have Zoom call users over the telecom network for audio whilst receiving video over the internet.

I didn't ask on costs, but it might be a viable solution.

  Edit>> I see you tried zoom, did you try the telecom audio solution?

Discord has <200ms latency for audio chat. Is that sufficient? Not Enterprise ready but it may not matter for your use case.

Semi off-topic, but the development of solution for this problem is a minor plot thread in "Rainbow's End" by Verner Vinge, which was a fairly popular sci-fi book with some really cool "near-future" predictions.

If you can get by with audio only I'd recommend Mumble with a strategically placed location of the server (to keep latency consistent between users assuming no routing shenanigans, need to test for this) and hope for the best.

Hey Kemitime, I'm trying to solve this problem at the moment. I'm looking to have a couple of people leading the singing, with others following on from where they are, with their mics down.

you really need to be < 20ms latency to coordinate multiple instruments (voices).

The best solution is JamKazam https://www.jamkazam.com/ (I have no affiliation and have not used the product in years)

You'll each need a good interface and Ethernet connections. A good interface on windows would typically have an ASIO driver. This is not an easy thing for more then a few people. Note: Jamkazam also makes an all-in-one device (JAMBLASTER).

What about Whereby?