Chat and voting

The chat panel is on the right, and can be hidden with the Chat button. It ghosts out when you are not connected, and clears when you join a new session.

Chat is how a NINJAM room organises itself. There is no other social layer -- no accounts, no profiles, no presence beyond the user list the server provides. Identity on a NINJAM server is a username and, at most, a password.

What you can type

You type	Does
hello	Says hello to the room
/me plays a wrong note	Third-person message
/msg bob you there?	Private message to bob
/topic Jam in D minor	Sets the room topic
!vote bpm 130	Proposes a tempo change
!vote bpi 8	Proposes an interval length change
/kick bob	Admin only

Admin commands such as /bpm and /bpi are passed through to the server, which will tell you if you lack the privilege.

Voting

A vote needs a share of everyone connected, not a share of the people who voted -- so not voting counts against a change rather than staying neutral. The share is the server's setting, and many servers have voting switched off entirely, in which case you will be told so. Antiphon shows a vote in progress as a chip you can click to add your vote, rather than making you type the command again; the chip carries the count, as 2/3.

When a vote passes, the tempo changes for everyone at the next interval -- including you. If you are in a DAW, that means matching your project tempo and pressing Sync again. See Syncing with your DAW.

Voting in the practice room

The practice room has voting switched on, so you can try it without a stranger watching. The band counts toward the threshold like any other client, which would leave you outvoted by your own bots -- so the band backs you: once you have voted for something a room of just the humans present would have carried, it casts the rest and the change goes through.

It will not start a vote, and it will not back one the people in the room have not backed first. In a room of two who disagree, nothing happens -- which is the point.

Keys and chord progressions

NINJAM has no protocol field for the key of a jam, so Antiphon does what Jamtaba does for chords: it sends an ordinary chat message in a tagged form.

• /key Dm sends [key: D minor], which Antiphon shows in the header and every other client shows as plain text. Nothing is invented on the wire and no other client has to cooperate.
• /chords Am F C G sends | Am | F | C | G |, which Jamtaba understands and Antiphon draws.

Somebody on another client can set the key too, in either of two ways: type the tag [key: D minor] by hand, or put /key D minor at the start of a line. Other clients pass an unknown slash command straight through as chat, so the second works everywhere and is easier to type.

The two forms exist because neither can do the other's job. The tag is matched anywhere in a line, so it can ride in the room topic -- which matters, because NINJAM replays no chat to somebody who joins later, and the topic is the only room state that persists. The /key form is matched only at the start of a line, which is what lets anyone talk about it: a sentence mentioning /key D minor in passing does not change the key, where a sentence mentioning the tag would.

Keys are read only from those two forms, never from free chat text. Guessing at prose is how you end up with a header confidently announcing that the room is playing in "I am tired" -- which is a real entry in another client's own test suite.

Reading the chart

An announced chart appears as a row of chord names just above the phase bar, each one where its change actually falls in the interval. The moving bar sweeps through them, so you can see the next chord coming rather than being told it exists after it arrives. The chord sounding now is the bright one, and the same chart in roman numerals sits at the right of the row above.

Only a chart somebody announced is ever drawn. If nobody has said what you are playing over, the row is not there.

Bars matter. | Dm7 | C# Csus | is two bars, and the second one holds two chords -- so Dm7 lasts twice as long as either of them. Writing the same three chords as | Dm7 | C# | Csus | gives each of them a third of the interval, which is a different piece of music.

Degrees, if you think that way

/chords also takes roman numerals and scale degrees, once a key is set:

• /chords ii V I in C major sends | Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 |
• /chords i VI III VII in D minor sends | Dm | Bb | F | C |
• /chords 1 4 b6 sends | C | F | Ab |

Case carries the quality -- IV is major, iv is minor -- and a plain number takes whatever chord the key already has on that degree. Your client works the chords out and sends the ordinary chord names, so nobody else in the room needs to know you typed it that way.

Each chord is spelled against the key rather than the whole chart being spelled one way. D major takes sharps, so its chords are written with sharps -- but a flattened second in it is still Eb7, because that is what the notation wants however the key signature reads.

The key nobody said

If someone announces a chart and no key has been set, Antiphon works out what key the chords suggest and offers it on the chip under the chat, next to a Set key button. Clicking it announces the key the same way /key would.

It only offers when the chords are actually decisive. | Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | can only be C major; | Am | F | C | G | is equally at home in C major and A minor, so nothing appears -- a suggestion that is wrong half the time is worse than no suggestion.