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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 typeDoes
helloSays hello to the room
/me plays a wrong noteThird-person message
/msg bob you there?Private message to bob
/topic Jam in D minorSets the room topic
!vote bpm 130Proposes a tempo change
!vote bpi 8Proposes an interval length change
/kick bobAdmin only

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

Voting

Votes need a majority of the room. Antiphon shows a vote in progress as a chip you can click to add your vote, rather than making you type the command again.

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.

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.
  • A line like | Dm7 | G7 | Bb | Am7 | is recognised as a chord progression and displayed as one.

Keys are read only from that tagged form, 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.