A friend and I have been writing (electronic) music together for over a decade, but we're now separated by distance. It's essential that we're able to see one DAW (i.e. the audio composition software) and hear everything together as we work.
For the "seeing" part, we found https://join.me's free desktop sharing service—and we were in particular impressed by its low latency and ease of sharing mouse control. However, its audio quality left much to be desired—the audio sounded like call center music over the phone.
But even more so than quality, we need low latency. When we tried SHOUTcast, there was about 5 or 6 seconds between me friend hitting "Play" and be hearing sounds. Impossible to work with. Of course, in retrospect, that was dumb—trying to use a broadcasting system for our point-to-point needs—but at the time we didn't think to make use of our soundcards' Stereo Mixer (basically a loopback mechanism, redirecting audio-out to line-in) and simply call each other over Skype or Hangouts. We're going to try this next, but we're afraid that not being able to set a constant audio quality (since both Skype and Hangouts adjust their stream qualities based on detected bandwidth quality) will become very annoying for the process. We'd rather hear a constant 128 Kbps MP3 quality stream, than something that shifts around as we try to listen and analyze things.
Is there a program, preferably lightweight, and preferably gratis (but, we'd pay for good software), that can stream audio both ways (i.e. make a "call") at a set quality and with low latency?