Ninjam - Skype for musicians
Justin Frankel (the creator of Winamp) has a new project called Ninjam. He announced it here today and it's extremely cool. Ninjam allows two or more people to jam through the net with real audio (no MIDI goofiness like past internet jamming software). It's like Skype for musicians, though the music is delayed a few measures to keep everything in sync. You plug your instruments in, the software provides a beat. Then you find out what a crappy guitar player you are.
I had a chance to play around on Ninjam with Justin last night and it worked great. No masterpieces were made -- though I got to lay down my brand new crappy guitar tapping skills -- but the potential is amazing. And while we we were messing around with guitar and bass, I assume there's no reason you can't feed any audio source into there. So it could be keyboards, could be vocals, or it could be copies of Ableton Live jamming together.
I'm told a GUI is being worked on and a release is coming soon. I can't wait.