SIRIUS is a video conferencing system specifically designed for online music education. In this respect, it is a system like Zoom or Skype for musicians.
The Berlin software developer and music enthusiast Sebastian Riegelbauer developed SIRIUS at the suggestion of the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. This way, the academy members could stay in touch musically during the first lockdown.
The video conferencing system, which was developed for music lessons and master classes, now supports more than 30 music schools and over 10,000 registered musicians. With SIRIUS, they can teach music online at top notch level with the best possible sound quality.
During the development of SIRIUS, we paid special attention to 3 features:
1. Excellent sound quality in SIRIUS video calls
SIRIUS stands for video conferencing with the highest sound quality of musical instruments and vocals.
This is not the case with conventional video conferencing systems such as Zoom or Skype. Those are optimized for business meetings and thus focus on the transmission of spoken language. Various audio filters and compression methods are used to emphasize on speech.
With SIRIUS, on the other hand, the audio is transmitted uncompressed and with high bandwidth. No audio filters and without noise reduction. You can set how high you want the quality of the sound to be, depending on the available Internet connection. Thus Sirius works similar to Skype or Zoom for musicians. But it delivers high sound quality.
In the settings, you can also lower the quality of the video transmission, for example. That way maximum good sound is transmitted. In addition to the brilliant sound experience, SIRIUS enables very low latency through a peer-to-peer connection. This is of high value for naturally flowing communication in teaching situations.
However, making music simultaneously is only possible with the help of special hardware for physical reasons.
Read a detailed article on latency by Caleb Dolister, here.
2. Highest privacy
In addition to the sound problems for use in music lessons, the lack of data protection of Zoom, Skype & Co often represents a major obstacle. In some cases, music schools are even prohibited from using services from American companies in the classroom. During the lockdowns of the Corona pandemic, no lessons took place for many months for the majority of the students, as a consequence.
SIRIUS uses the highest European data protection standards and is operated on servers of a German provider.
At no time it’s visible by whom, when or from which location the video platform is used.
As a browser-based system, SIRIUS can be used on all available devices such as laptops, tablets or smartphones with an existing Internet connection and requires no additional hardware.
Lessons can take place live in the virtual music room in the browser without any download. The students do not have to register and therefore no data is collected — a great advantage for the data protection of the youngest.
Each SIRIUS session takes place via a peer-to-peer connection. That means that the transfer of audio and video data takes place directly from device to device, without an intermediary server. Thus, technically, no data from the session can be stored.
3. Ease of Use
SIRIUS provides the virtual space for professional music lessons. It includes tools such as a digital metronome and tuner, a chat function for sending files, and the screen-sharing function.
All of this has been designed to be very easy to use for the youngest as well as seniors.
A very simple, but sonorous video conferencing system for music lessons!
This is how easy SIRIUS works.
As a teacher, you log into your SIRIUS account in the browser and start a session in your own music room.
You send the link (for example sirius.video/toni) and the password of your room to your student. They follow the link and “knock” on your room.
As soon as you are ready for the lesson, you allow your students into the room and the music lesson begins. 🎶
Try it yourself and register for our free version at SignUp.
