JackTrip-WebRTC: Networked music experiments with PCM stereo audio in a Web browser
A large number of web applications are available for videoconferencing and those have been very helpful during the lockdown periods caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, none of these offer high fidelity stereo audio for music performance, mainly because the current WebRTC RTCPeerConnection standard only supports compressed audio formats. This paper presents the results achieved implementing 16-bit PCM stereo audio transmission on top of the WebRTC RTCDataChannel with the help of Web Audio and AudioWorklets. Several measurements with different configurations, browsers, and operating systems are presented. They show that, at least on the loopback network interface, this approach can achieve better quality and lower latency than using RTCPeerConnection, i.e., latencies as low as 50-60~ms have been achieved on MacOS.
@inproceedings{2021_20,
abstract = {A large number of web applications are available for videoconferencing and those have been very helpful during the lockdown periods caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, none of these offer high fidelity stereo audio for music performance, mainly because the current WebRTC RTCPeerConnection standard only supports compressed audio formats. This paper presents the results achieved implementing 16-bit PCM stereo audio transmission on top of the WebRTC RTCDataChannel with the help of Web Audio and AudioWorklets. Several measurements with different configurations, browsers, and operating systems are presented. They show that, at least on the loopback network interface, this approach can achieve better quality and lower latency than using RTCPeerConnection, i.e., latencies as low as 50-60~ms have been achieved on MacOS.},
address = {Barcelona, Spain},
author = {Sacchetto, Matteo and Servetti, Antonio and Chafe, Chris},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Web Audio Conference},
editor = {Joglar-Ongay, Luis and Serra, Xavier and Font, Frederic and Tovstogan, Philip and Stolfi, Ariane and A. Correya, Albin and Ramires, Antonio and Bogdanov, Dmitry and Faraldo, Angel and Favory, Xavier},
month = {July},
pages = {},
publisher = {UPF},
series = {WAC '21},
title = {JackTrip-WebRTC: Networked music experiments with PCM stereo audio in a Web browser},
year = {2021},
ISSN = {2663-5844}
}