Episode 447 – TikTok Troubles, Facebook Audio Codec, And JackTrip Labs Execs

My guests this week are Mike Dickey and Russ Gavin, of JackTrip Labs. The JackTrip Foundation is a non-profit collaboration between Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and Silicon Valley software entrepreneurs. JackTrip Labs provides a low-latency collaboration tool that makes it easy for musicians to perform together online.

Mike Dickey, who’s the CEO of JackTrip Labs, founded his first company in high school, and dropped out of Carnegie Mellon to become a full-time entrepreneur. Since then, Mike has built and sold three startup companies. His latest venture was Cloudmeter, which Splunk acquired in 2013. Prior to co-founding JackTrip, Mike held various leadership roles at Splunk focusing on Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure and Product Management.

Besides being the co-founder and COO of JackTrip Labs, Dr. Russ Gavin is also the Director of Bands at Stanford University. A lifelong advocate for accessible music education, Russ has taught music in K-12 and collegiate environments, continuously seeking and creating opportunities to utilize technology in the music classroom. His research publications have appeared in the Journal of Research in Music Education, the International Journal of Music Education, Psychology of Music, the Journal of Music Teacher Education, and the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.

During the interview we spoke about how JackTrip Labs  started, the things that contribute to latency in online collaboration, the musicians who are the most sensitive to latency, why zero latency can actually be disconcerting to some players, why conference calling apps won’t cut it for music, and much more.

I spoke with Russ and Mike via zoom.

On the intro I’ll take a look at what TikTok’s decreasing revenue target means, and Facebook’s new audio data compression codec.

var podscribeEmbedVars = {

epId: 84118014,

backgroundColor: 'white',

font: undefined,

fontColor: undefined,

speakerFontColor: undefined,

height: '600px',

showEditButton: false,

showSpeakers: true,

showTimestamps: true

};