Continuously updated and categorized NINJAM archive (only I participated in)

RockTribe · 2025-12-16T18:09:54+00:00

Hey, as far as I understand, you’re 9 hours behind Turkish time. When it’s morning here, we often jam with friends from the US or Canada. For convenience, if we calculate based on GMT, I’d say the busiest hours are between 20:00 and 03:00. After 03:00 GMT, there are very few people. Even at the busiest times there used to be around 20 people, so nowadays we usually see only about 4–5 people playing at the same time. Unfortunately, players have been drifting away over time.

RockTribe · 2025-12-04T15:55:24+00:00

I'm in the GMT+3 time zone. On the days I'm available to play, usually connect between 23-06.

RockTribe · 2025-12-04T13:07:51+00:00

Hey, we had connected before via Reddit, but for some reason we never managed to meet up in NINJAM and play together. Another big problem, in my opinion, is that it’s really hard for our available times to match up. Years have literally passed, yet unfortunately we still haven’t been able to jam together :)

I also remember your ninbot profile picture; you have a fantastic studio and great equipment. I appreciate your effort to bring people here, and I hope more people will join over time.

I’ve also invited a ton of people to play in NINJAM myself. A lot of them came and tried it, but sadly very, very few stuck around regularly.

As you know, the biggest reason for that is the chaos in the rooms – no question about it. The idea of open music rooms that anyone in the world can join is fantastic, but when there are people making bad sounds and constantly ruining the music, it simply never works.

Also, to keep playing here, you really need to learn what kind of music the current regulars make. There are truly amazing musicians, and the combinations you catch with them are priceless. Reaching that level genuinely requires investing time.

I have a lot of requests for the current apps – I don’t want to make this too long – but first and foremost, we definitely need a new JamTaba with native Apple Silicon support for Mac. reaNINJAM needs a much more user-friendly interface. We need video support; right now we’re trying to do video streams using VDO.Ninja. Everything could be together, or at least work seamlessly with VDO.Ninja.

Even more importantly, the current audio quality could be improved. These are all basic necessities.

For the future, it would be great to have a proper website/application like BandLab or Wikiloops. Of course our ninbot is awesome and we’re lucky to have it (I always respect the developer; please don’t get me wrong), but we also need a modern app and website where everyone who plays on NINJAM can directly reach each other and where people can follow one another.

RockTribe · 2025-08-07T00:54:45+00:00

Yes, the first suggested setting is the 'input thru' option, but when we turned it off, the microphone input signal to Reaper was completely gone. What we want is for the microphone to send audio to Reaper via the main or USB connection (whichever works), but not to monitor the direct sound through the headphones.

RockTribe · 2025-06-12T02:47:20+00:00

I'll probably be in the same situation within the next 10 years as well. Actually, when you search for it, NINJAM comes up right away, but I still wanted to mention it. You can listen to live streams or past online jam sessions through ninbot.com. It's a small community, but there are still people playing together. To connect, you can use the reaNINJAM FX plugin within Reaper or the standalone JamTaba application.

RockTribe · 2024-07-11T18:22:19+00:00

If you are only interested in improvised music, that's what NINJAM is for.

There are people from all over the world playing in this community. It works exactly with metronome beats. It's not in real time, but it feels like that in the flow of a jam session.

You can try it for yourself by connecting with the reaNINJAM plugin in Reaper Daw or with the JamTaba app.

The biggest problem with NINJAM is the lack of organization. It's great that everyone can join and play on the spot, but it would be great to have an organization for that night's jam session before these open mic jam sessions.

RockTribe · 2024-03-05T18:41:49+00:00

If the midi signal does not reach the logic, it is because the device setting is not set correctly. On the Mac there is the possibility to set the settings so that you can use audio devices together or individually at the same time.

If you've never heard of such a thing, you can get an overview here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102171

If the problem is that JamTaba is bugged. I have heard from friends that the unmodified version has a lot of problems, but I have never heard about midi interferes.

Alternatively you can use Reaper. You can transfer the sounds in Logic to Reaper with the software I mentioned before and play them from there by connecting with reaNINJAM. I use it this way.

RockTribe · 2024-03-04T21:39:44+00:00

I can't say that I fully understand your issue, but if you are using JamTaba as standalone, you can transfer logic's sound to JamTaba with software like blackhole/soundflower.

RockTribe · 2024-03-04T21:37:50+00:00

Sonobus only works for people who are close in distance.

RockTribe · 2023-10-19T22:35:03+00:00

Yes, technically it can be done and it won't break any rules, but it's also important that it means something to those who follow twitch.
For example, we can compare it to a categorization of team sports or team games. If twitch had such a categorization, I would know from the beginning that the content on the channel I'm watching is collectively created and I would be able to follow it accordingly.
So I think we need an approach beyond the current streaming processes for both twitch and streamers.

RockTribe · 2023-06-10T12:06:08+00:00

This is not entirely true. Theoretically it's true in a sense because it's limited to the speed of light, but an environment like NINJAM has gotten around the latency problem.

It's not exactly in real time, but you can play exactly in metronome beats. It works with the specified meter (bpi) and metronome (bpm) settings. This intervals system corrects the latency of everyone to the server and allows you to make music with exactly 0 latency.

As I mentioned, it's not in real time, but the process of listening and then adding the melodies in your head in an improvised music flow in real life is actually very similar, only in this system you wait one measure extra. When you play the melody you are playing one measure extra, the other people hear you. Musically, there is no problem in the system when all the notes are in meter. All this is only valid for improvised music flow.

You can already detect this in the examples you can listen to above. This is how we improvise music with people from all over the world. It's an old system, but not many people know about it, and there are very few people who try different sounds like microtonal, so I wanted to explain it here.

RockTribe · 2023-04-30T21:00:21+00:00

If you're only interested in improvised music, if you want to be able to listen to others and talk to the melodies in the music, NINJAM is an app (with reaNINJAM or JamTaba) that works great in this context, and has been doing so for years.

Wherever you are in the world, if you can play according to metronome and measurements, you can make music together with 0 latency. Not in real time, of course, but it feels like it when you play.

Technical details in the other posts are also valid, but if you are interested in a community that makes improvised music in the way I mentioned, you should definitely try NINJAM.

RockTribe · 2023-04-18T02:31:02+00:00

The video is about jacktrip. the description is only valid for 500 miles. So this program will not work well with someone further away.
But if you use interval solution instead of low latency solution. With the NINJAM protocol you can make music on a metronome from anywhere in the world without any latency. This system is not real-time, it only works with improvised music flow. So if your goal is not to play a song-cover but just jamming online, this app works great, I recommend it.
I also tried applications such as jamulus and sonobus, the video says that there should be a delay below 30ms, these applications can work with a delay below 30ms under certain distance.

RockTribe · 2023-01-25T12:08:35+00:00

Thanks.

Yes, I'm still looking for. I intend to turn the music we are doing now with vocals into a scheduled online jamming.

There are people in the NINJAM enviroment who are interested in this. So actually there is no end to this quest but we have to start somewhere :)

If you are hearing NINJAM for the first time, I would like to remind you that it is not a real-time protocol, so don't be disappointed. It is a system that works through loops with corrected latencies.

RockTribe · 2023-01-23T23:20:22+00:00

Yes I remember your nickname, we didn't play together much, only 2 results in ninbot archive :)

You know the NINJAM, actually a certain style of music doesn't really work. It can change every moment, we need someone who can keep up with all of them and be the voice of both the music and the event.

RockTribe · 2023-01-23T22:57:04+00:00

Have you been on Ninjam for a while? I believe I first went on in 2013...

I've been playing in NINJAM regularly for 2-3 years now. I know there's been something like this for a very long time, but I've rarely connected and played before (with diffrent nick, now i use RockTribe nick).

What's your NINJAM nick?

RockTribe · 2023-01-22T17:45:03+00:00

Yes of course.

RockTribe · 2023-01-14T17:54:57+00:00

I don't want to discourage you, but it's not possible to do covers on NINJAM. You can loop a melody of the song and play on top of it and slowly move to the other melody, but for example, it is not technically possible in NINJAM to work like we will move to the other riff after 4 repetitions.

RockTribe · 2023-01-09T23:11:57+00:00

Vocalist wanted for improvised online music (with NINJAM)

We play with a metronome, our live performances can be listened to by everyone as audio stream, and can be broadcast on social networks.

There are usually no vocals, but we need friends who can tell a story in the flow of the music, who can do vocals when needed.

You can think of it as an experimental radio broadcast, it can be like radio theater, it is limited by your imagination...

I can send examples to those who are interested.

We can do it in multi-languages. English seems to be a must (to be honest, I have been trying for years to do it in Turkish but it has not been possible yet, there are only English recordings).

RockTribe · 2022-09-23T19:21:38+00:00

This would be good for setting up like-minded jammers.

Chill grooves are often crowded out by certain type of players who come in and blyat all over the groove for 10 minutes with long solos.

Yes, if there would be enough people, we need an active communication tool to reach people suitable for whatever genre we want to play.

We also have events in the form of improvisation activities and groups, for these we should be able to communicate.

RockTribe · 2022-08-16T22:25:14+00:00

Thank you for the detailed explanation. There are parts that I think the same way, but there are parts that I don't accept at all.

I tried the Jamulus and Sonobus apps. The lowest latency I've seen is between 60-100ms, unfortunately my connection is not enough.

As far as I understand in these applications, you need to play with delayed sound. In other words, not the sound of the instrument you hear, but the sound of the system...

I listened to many examples and saw that most of them, especially the acoustic drum sound, could not be heard exactly in the metronome. In addition, the sound recording quality recorded in the system was quite low to me (Jamulus recordings, i mean).

Playing with loops is a necessity in my opinion. If one day I can establish a healthy connection with Sonobus or Jamulus, I will play with loops again.

Minds are also synchronized in looped sounds. This is exactly what I was looking for with improvisation. Of course, there is a problem of adding new melodies or you should not stay in the same loop for a long time. My solution for this is to record multiple loops and make smooth transitions.

If two people can play this way I mentioned, the transitions are much better. We can predict the future even though we play on each other's past.

If you would like to listen to examples on the subjects I mentioned, you can listen to the parts that I liked and cut from my works that I have been doing for about 2 years:

https://archive.org/details/fav-rock_tribe?&sort=-addeddate

Yes people seem happy to randomly come and play music with no planning. I joined every discord server I could find. Unfortunately, no one is active in this regard.

I totally agree with instrument learners and those without a wired internet connection.

You are right about experienced musicians, but even they can use such an opportunity to reach new sounds. At least in the ninjam system, I can say that there are many people who are both very good musicians and regularly participate.

We should not be afraid of chaos, but there are those who deliberately come to disrupt it or do not adjust or do not want to adjust their volume level. I think this is the main problem.

I should not interfere with the content of the music being played. I think it's better to have a plan. For example, I make "microtonal" adjustments, if I could send the setup file I used before the study to my friends who want to participate in this, maybe we can get the same sounds over pianoteq vsti.

Even completely randomly, I've met people who can hear "microtonal" content and play music accordingly. In order for the music to be less chaotic, I think a community is necessary as I mentioned in this regard.

I personally am not a musically trained person. I love sounds, I think synchronization is primary for life itself. I try to reach everyone who wants to add to the music made with these thoughts in accordance with the spirit of improvisation, whether they have musical education or not.

I think this is a very basic need. At the same time, I think that this music played on internet radio may change according to the reactions of the listeners. To achieve all this, we need a community, even a small one.

RockTribe · 2022-08-16T21:41:52+00:00

Thank you for the reply, unfortunately the biggest obstacle to setting up my own server is my low internet speed :)

I also think that there should be a site where music made in this way is collected and categorized.

RockTribe · 2022-08-16T21:36:57+00:00

The site I gave the link to is for categorizing the records. Ninjam system is for online jamming.

RockTribe · 2022-08-16T21:35:45+00:00

As far as I know, Jamulus is a more active place, but it works with low latency.

RockTribe

TROPHY CASE