Jam 2.0
Open Source Audio Room Server for Meetings, Workshops, Podcasting and Social Networking
Jam is an open source audio room server for meetings, workshops, podcasting and social networking.
Jam 2.0 is our biggest release so far and comes with countless new features like support for large rooms, ultra-low latency conversations, recording, improved reliability as well as managed hosting and customization.
Jam 2.0 is available starting today. You can find the source code on Gitlab and on Github and install it on your own server or you can get
a managed server maintained by us.
Jam audio rooms are like rooms in Zoom or Google Meet,
just without video.
Sounds familiar? Audio rooms are simple and fun. They have found their way into many popular platforms like Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Discord Stages, Slack Huddles or Spotify Greenroom.
Jam is a low-latency, high quality audio room server that gives you as many audio rooms as you need.
Jam can be used stand-alone, like Zoom or Google Meet or as building block for your own software, similar to Agora, Whereby or Twilio.
To learn more about using Jam as a building block: join us on Discord
and let us know what you have in mind.
🥳 Large Rooms
Jam always worked great for small rooms of up to about 20 participants.
This is great for team meetings, small workshops, one-on-ones, gaming or podcasting.
But there are many more use cases like online conferences, large meetups, live sports events, community announcements, breaking news, or social networking that need large audio rooms that can handle hundreds or even thousands of participants at the same time.
Support for large rooms was by far the most common feature request we got since we released the first version of Jam.
Jam 2.0 comes with full support for large rooms, scaling up to thousands of participants per room. Support for large rooms is available out of the box and enabled by default.
🎙 Reliability and Audio Quality
One of the most important things for apps used for communication is that they “just work”. Working ideally means both every time and all of the time.
Unfortunately there are countless things that can go wrong during audio calls. Even worse, many of these problems are difficult for users to understand and fix. It just “doesn’t work”.
For us this means we have to identify, understand and solve as many of the common and not so common scenarios for errors as possible.
Switching from wifi to mobile data, microphone permissions, iOS or Android going into stand-by, unusual browser and operating system settings, inaccurate clocks and so on and so on.
Jam 2.0 comes with a completely re-designed logic responsible for reconnections, peer identity management, as well as for how audio is routed, which makes Jam 2.0 the most reliable release so far.
🏎 Ultra-Low Latency
Apps for video and audio calls sometimes feel choppy and unnatural. There are many reasons for this but some have to do with the delay between you saying something to you being heard by others.
Getting audio quality and latency right is not easy. There are many tradeoffs involved with managing bandwidth as well as how background noise reduction is handled.
Many of the design decisions we made for Jam 2.0 are about latency and about how conversations feel.
One of them is about how speakers send their audio to each other. Instead of going through a server, which would add additional delay, speakers on Jam send their own audio to each other directly, peer to peer (using WebRTC).
Conversations in Jam flow better and feel more vivid.
📼 Podcasting and Recording
Another new feature in Jam 2.0 is support for recording. We built this with podcasting in mind but it also works well for other use-cases like meetings or gaming.
Hosts of a room can start and stop recordings and get an audio file once the recording ends. This file can then be used for post-processing or transcription in most of the popular tools used for podcast production.
If you are using Jam for podcasting or would like to give it a try:
please let us know.
🛰 Managed Hosting
Jam is open source and free to use. You can grab the source code for Jam 2.0 and install it on your own server.
We also offer managed hosting for Jam where we host and maintain Jam servers for you. Managed hosting includes regular updates to the newest stable releases as well as support around customization and integration.
🎨 Custom UI
For advanced, custom use cases you can now completely re-define the user interface for Jam. From simple configurations using URL parameters to building your own user interface from scratch.
Do you have an existing application and want to add ad-hoc audio rooms and floating bubble heads? You can use Jam 2.0 to power the audio rooms and use the Jam Core JavaScript library to add exactly the user experience that fits your application.
Jam Core gives you full control over look and feel.
We can’t wait to find out about what you will build using Jam 2.0 and Jam Core. Please let us know, we’re more than happy to help where we can.
🍓 Excited about Jam 2.0?
If you’re excited about Jam 2.0 one of the best ways you can help is by making people aware about the release and to give it a try. Enjoy!
And don’t forget to join the Jam community and say hi.
We’re on Discord, Twitter, Gitlab and Github.
