Reply To: Connect 2 computers on same LAN to WAN

Alex needed to change the port from 50000 to something else since a common router in Germany used port 50000 and about 20 above for VoIP.

It really doesn’t matter which incoming port to the router is used. Technically it should be possible to define an individual port for each user, but the you cannot use your login at a different location without changing it in the settings. Doesn’t make sense, leads to (user) problems, so not a good idea.

With groups of more than 4 or 5 it might make sense to use the (simple) server mode, but even the server might have user limits. That’s the reason why there is a complex server, but it needs a lot of cores (probably more than four) to run a choir. Alex test was with 25 singers and (if I remember correctly) eight cores.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get the (simple) server mode running on Mac OS X or Windows. Alex recommended Linux, which I haven’t tested yet.
You might need to get a realtime friendly version like Ubuntu Studio (that what I will check when I find time for it).

BTW, the UDP ports showed on the SoundJack stage are the ports of your computer, not the ports on the internet side of your router. The port number does not matter, the router decides if he wants to use a different port and communicates this to your computer and they both use the new port number to communicate.
Keep in mind that in your LAN you can have a lot of computers that all have the same number of ports, but only one address on the internet side, so only one set of these same ports. So it would not be possible to use all ports from all computers at the same time. If two computers use the same ports (i.e. for web browsing) at least one of them has to change the port to be able to communicate independently from the other computer. So port changing is a standard thing and nothing evil. It’s the router manufacturers decision when and to which address a port connection gets changed. Don’t worry about that.

The basic problem is that if you have two computers on your LAN with SoundJack, only one can get the traffic addressed to a certain port from the internet side IP-address, because the router (typically) only gets one IP-address by the internet provider (to keep the very limited number of IPv4 addresses low). Theoretically it would be possible to solve it by additional ports for SoundJack that are redirected to different computers on your LAN, but in general it doesn’t make sense. The load of connections rises for any participant and using a multichannel audio interface is a better solution for such a situation.

If SoundJack would be able to use IPv6 addresses (which is currently not the case and might take a longer time until it is realized) and your internet provider can give you an IPv6 subnetwork instead of a single address and your router can process IPv6, then that problem is solved. But until then, the only way to realize that is use a server as the destination of the port forwarding.
Keep in mind, that even then every SoundJack session you want to participate in must be in server mode on your server. Even if you only use one computer or you need to reconfigure the port forwarding in your router to your computer instead of the server if you want to connect your computer in p2p-mode.

The only info how to start the server is available at the “download” and “info”->”server” tabs. But this is in Linux dialect (“./file”), on Windows it would be a backslash instead (“.\file”) and on Mac OS X it would be the same as with Linux, but you need to use the Terminal and go into the SJCuvwxyz.app folder to find the file.
But that does not work on Mac OS X (10.11) and Windows (10 Prof.), it results in an error message on my machines.