Jacktrip: Under the Hood of an Engine for Network Audio

The design of a platform for bi-directional musical performance using modern WAN networks poses several challenges that are different from related applications, e.g., synchronous LAN studio systems or uni-directional WAN streaming. The need to minimize as much as possible audio latency and also maximize audio quality requires specific strategies which are informed, in part, by musical decisions. The authors present some of the key design elements of the Jack-Trip application which has evolved through several years of deployment in musical work over wide-area networks.