ABLETON LIVE - VIRTUAL JAM BAND, OR NOT?

Just imagine. How about a next version of Ableton that allows for creation of a virtual web-based band? Internet may suffer from latency problems but we're curious if jamming around with a few people over internet would be affected by that too much. Suppose three people have shared the same live set, and all can benefit from native control of Live with the APC-40. All they basically would have to do is load the same set and synchronize their APC's and they'll hear exactly the same - or is that too simplistic a thought?

Ableton's head of techies, Dom Wilms - who's given us some pretty nice insight on what's behind Live three times before - was kind enough to give his opinion on the subject.

"It is not as easy as one might think. There are just too many things depending on each other: First, you can't just synchronize multiple APCs as they don't transmit any tempo information at all but only communicate the button presses and knob turns of the user to Live - and Live sends back which buttons to light up to reflect what the software is doing.

"So, the first step would be just to synchronizing different copies of Live running on different computers connected the internet. This is already quite a task as the internet is "speaking" package based, not stream based. It is possible to transmit continuous timing information using package based protocols but the price is always the latency resulting from the buffering you need to do.

"If you manage the sync task, more questions will come to surface: How should it all behave now? Not even thinking yet about how to route audio in real-time from one machine to the

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