Basically, the title. After years of inactivty, I’ll be taking music (cello) lessons again, with my teacher of yesteryear, from whom I’ve moved half a country away.
She has suggested Zoom but is open to alternatives. I don’t particularly like Zoom, plus I have a feeling better quality can be had through a custom solution - but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what exactly would be a good fit for this project.
Maybe Jitsi? Does someone here have experience with it and could tell me if it’s possible to set something like a “target” audio quality?
For hardware, I basically have two options. Both are already in use, for different things, and have sufficient processing capabilities - albeit no GPU:
- host everything at home. Plus: lowest possible latency from me to the server. Not sure how much that is worth though.
- root server in the Hetzner cloud: much faster network speed. Again though, not sure how beneficial that is, the ultimate bottleneck will always be my upload speed (40Mbit)
OK, I realize that this post is a but of a random assortment of thoughts. I’d be really happy about suggestions and / or hearing about other’s experiences with similar use-cases!
You’ll be hard pressed to match Zoom. Audio and video quality are very good. There’s even a mode for musicians, so it won’t try to filter the instrument out as ‘noise’.
It’s definitely the fallback option if DIY doesn’t pan out. The no-filtering can definitely also be enabled in the Jitsi config, so at least in that regards I’m not too worried.
Throughout the pandemic I’ve largely been able to avoid both Teams and Zoom, but Zoom did cause a number of problems on Linux, so I’m not too hyped to give it another try :/
Consider your teacher’s experience with technology here. They may not understand other setups as well as zoom. Plus if there is technical trouble, that may cut into your instruction time. I’m not a huge fan of big-company services like zoom, Skype, teams, or similar, but unless you and your contacts have the time and know-how to troubleshoot issues if they arise, you may want to stick with a known thing like zoom.