Playing on the same network

Picking local in the host wizard's first step runs the session server as a process on your own computer instead of a cloud machine. Every desktop app build bundles its own jamstreamd, so there is nothing to install and no account to create.

Local is selectable the moment the app opens, its row reads no account needed, and the wizard skips the region step. The step that would price the session reads "Before you start" instead, and the launch button is Start the session.

Everything else is the same flow: invites are minted up front, the app completes a real encrypted handshake with the server before showing them, joins you automatically, and the Invites tab ends the session.

When local is the right choice

• Everyone is in the same room or on the same network. The invites carry your machine's network address (for example 192.168.1.12), so any machine on the same network can join.
• You want the lowest possible latency. The audio path is one hop across your own network, with no internet in it.
• You want to try JamStream before creating a cloud account. Local sessions need no credentials and cost nothing.

Playing alone on one machine also works.

The limits, honestly

Broadcasting to Twitch or YouTube Live from a local session needs ffmpeg and mediamtx on your PATH, which the app does not bundle, and does not work on Windows yet. Streaming has the details.

Everything else about a local session, including recording, needs nothing installed.

An invite that names 192.168.1.12 means nothing outside your network. Reaching a local session across the internet would take:

• forwarding the session's UDP port to this computer in your router's admin pages
• a public IP, which many home connections behind carrier NAT do not have
• an invite carrying that public address, which the current build cannot mint: a local invite carries loopback and the LAN address it discovered, and nothing else

JamStream automates none of that. If anyone is joining from outside your network, host in the cloud instead; see Provider setup.

Ending and the idle exit

End session for everyone on the Invites tab kills the server process, and the same shared state means jamstream end from a terminal does too; for local sessions the instance id shown in status and end output is the process id.

Closing the app window mid-session asks the same question a cloud session asks, because the server deliberately outlives its launcher. If you forget, the server watches its own activity and exits after 10 minutes with no musicians connected. There is no bill either way.

The local server also exits at the 12 hour hard cap, and the invites expire with it.

If a laptop dies mid-session or a state file is lost, jamstream sweep finds local strays the same way it finds cloud ones: the local provider keeps an on-disk registry of the processes it spawned, so a later sweep from a fresh shell still sees and kills them.

From the terminal

jamstream host --provider local runs the same flow (local is the default provider, so the flag is optional):

• it prints one invite per seat after the handshake check
• it takes --musicians, --listeners, --idle-min, and --port; the wizard offers the same seats and windows
• the CLI defaults to port 43210; the app picks a free UDP port for each local session instead

See the host reference.

Unlike the app, the CLI does not bundle the server, so local mode needs a jamstreamd binary already on your machine; nothing is downloaded. It is taken from JAMSTREAMD_PATH, then from beside the running executable, then from your PATH.

host fails before starting anything with an error naming every place it looked. On Linux the install script's --with-server flag puts one in the second of those places.

A session is only handed to you once the server it started can be asked to end cleanly, so a jamstreamd too old to answer that request is stopped again and the error says what it did not do. Use the server from the same release as the CLI.

If a local server exits at startup, the first place to look is its server.log, in the session's own directory under your platform's data directory in jamstream/sessions/; on Windows that is %LOCALAPPDATA%\jamstream\sessions\<id>\server.log.