Dante Protocol Networked Audio

Installation & Configuration Linux
#9
Figure 5 on page 16 of that white paper seems to be saying to me that Dante can be extended in the future to use additional protocols. That is Dante currently is not interoperable with AVB, but that it can be made interoperable with AVB by future extensions to the protocol.

Yes that was the intention of the comment, that they sold it in part by saying that they would be interoperable with AVB when it was released (It wasn’t even nearly in as firm a state as it is now at that time).

Probably not really a concern right now, I think the only production gear I have seen using AVB is the new Mark of the Unicorn network gear (which uses AVB to connect between units, but until recently only connected to the computer with USB or Thunderbolt. A news release on the MOTU web page says that Ethernet connectivity between a Mac and those units is now supported with the latest firmware).

BiAmp is one I see often that utilizes AVB. There are a few others, but you are correct in that Motu’s new interfaces have been intriguing to watch and may represent some new life in it.

Might be easier to try to make a jackd backend first, and after everything is working decide if it should be incorporated into ALSA. Might be analogous to the situation that happened with FFADO, create a stand alone implementation to get everything working, and if it seems solid it can be merged into ALSA later.

You hit the nail on the head there, my suspicion is that this is the case.

   Seablade
#10

Well hopefully it won’t be that hard to create the software side to AES67 with Dante hardware on our Linux boxes.

#11
Well hopefully it won't be that hard to create the software side...

After all, it is only software… :slight_smile:

#12

Lol… I didn’t mean it to sound that it would be easy.

#13

Hey guys check this out:

http://www.digigram.com/products/product_infos.php?prod_key=19250

It’s has full AES67 interoperability so I believe it could be used with Dante installed interfaces. Under drivers it says ALSA and under systems it says Linux OSes. This might be an alternative although maybe not a cheap one.

#14

Some more things I found for Linux Audio considering Dante:

http://fouraudio.com/en/products/dante-pcie-card.html

#15

Also found this link:

https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2/issues/40

I’m assuming that with jackd everything on the network would show up in connections manager like Catia or Patchage?

#16

@dsreyes

Yes that is the card and manufacturer I referenced earlier. I looked into the cost to import here and while I had a not insignificant amount of money set aside, I just couldn’t afford it. It would actually almost be cheaper for me to purchase a Dante enabled digital console with USB capabilities. Maybe it has changed since i looked into it. If, as your second link intimates, there is a Dante ALSA driver that can run on top of most PCI-E Dante cards, then I might invest in a rednet card and try it out at some point.

  Seablade
#17

Of course that thread also mentions only the commercial licensed driver from Audinate, which I am not sure on the pricing to license it in that case on top of the price of the card.

  Seablade
#18

How much did the Four Audio PCIe card go for at the time you were looking into it? The FocusRite card is going for $1000.

#19

@dsreyes
I am hesitant to mention dollar amounts as this was some time ago and prices may have changed, so suffice to say it was close to twice that after conversion and import IIRC. I had, at the time, enough set aside to order a Rednet card when I contacted them, I couldn’t stretch that to what I needed to in order to import one of their cards sadly. I will likely eventually just get a Rednet Dante->MADI device and an RME MADI card at some point.

    Seablade
#20

Well in the jack git link I provided one of them stated they were testing a FocusRite Dante PCIe card ($1000) and it was working with Audinate’s licensed driver. But I’m confused, in that same thread it was stated that there is already an ALSA Dante driver.

#21

@dsreyes

So based off reading that thread there are two things I believe are occuring:

  1. Adrian Knoth (adiknoth) is likely using the driver and card from FourAudio (I believe he is the one that initially pointed me in their direction)
  2. Dell Green likely has a developer kit from Audinate (Brooklyn II Kit and Card, which I believe has a Linux SDK IIRC)

Audinate has flat out told me that they have no intention of releasing a Linux driver, that was years ago mind you so maybe things have changed, but I doubt it. My suspicion is that Dell Green is using the development kit but I do not know for certain. It would be worth contacting him I suppose just in case so I just added a comment there to see if he responds.

      Seablade
#22

@seablade

I’ll keep an eye on that and ask around. Thanks for responding

#23

For everybody’s interest, Merging Technologies provides Windows/ASIO and MacOS/CoreAudio drivers and Virtual Sound Card for Ravenna since many years.

A MacOS/CoreAudio AES67 VAD has been released early this year and is available free of charge, please check http://www.merging.com/

Now, to complete the panorama, Merging is about to release a Linux ALSA driver/VAD for Ravenna/AES67, a few distributions are already in advanced testing. As a Linux/ALSA doesn’t deploy as easily as a Windows/Mac driver, anyone interested can contact us on http://www.merging.com/contact or directly to aes67@merging.com for discussing availability and deployment options.

That may allow an easy bridge to Dante since they are finally AES67 compatible.

Dominique

#24

@dbrulhart

This is great to hear, sadly since Allen and Heath hasn’t updated the firmware on their dante cards yet, there is no AES67 support there yet that I know of, so knock off two of my systems there(Possibly more would have to think). I have to check on my Yamaha CL system though to see whether they support AES67 or not.

     Seablade
#25

I concur with seablade that this is great to hear. I don’t currently have the budget to change to AES67 hardware, but it does open up interesting possibilities for future upgrades.

#26

How about the MOTU AVB interfaces? They have builtin 48 channel mixers for their devices and they just released firmware to use AVB as a separate interface. I’ve been reading up on the development for the Intel i210 cards that supports AVB on linux and thought this might be a possibility in the near future.

#27

A very late reply to the Dante thing… Things didn’t get much better on Linux. They however did get better in the world of hardware, not so much im terms of PC hardware, but in terms of mixing consoles, breakout boxes, stage boxes, wireless microphone receivers etc. – Yamaha even uses only Dante on their recent digital mixing consoles and stage boxes and nothing else.

The Dante PCIe card is offered by several vendors, it looks more or less the same in all pictures. Apparently, the variant called LX-Dante by DigiGram comes with ALSA drivers: LX-DANTE - Support | Digigram

RME has a USB DigiFace Dante at around the same price point that should work in class-compliant mode, then not offering TotalMix. Additionally, it can convert MADI to DANTE standalone.

There’s the Dante Aviom 2x2 USB adaptor that should work for simple purposes.

So far I used none of these. I used the Dante Virtual Soundcard on OS X using MixBus for testing. This does a good job, but it doesn’t work on my old MacBook pro with any Dante latency below 11msec (4msec and 1msec are the other options). Also it seems to be pretty at its limits at 16 channels at 48khz. In Dante Controller you can get a statistics of dropped audio frames and it is not promising. I got dropouts when using 16 channels at 4msecs, I was okay at 11msecs.

So my conclusion for now is that albeit the Dante Virtual Soundcard would be really good to have on Linux, it probably wouldn’t be good enough for a 24channel/96khz recording studio setup. I’d like to use it to feed stereo playbacks into my digital mixing console without going analog.

Audinate recently announced a Dante embedded platform that they say will be available for Linux, too. In theory, and to my limited knowledge, this would allow to develop something like a Jack sink/source for Dante, but it might well be that legal restrictions wouldn’t allow for it.

Some people report AES67 to work well on Linux, but apparently it is not as easy to set up. Dante is really smooth to get going once you’ve understood a few basic things. Note that ES67 interoperability is a feature of the Dante devices. So far all recent devices I’ve seen would offer me to switch on AES67 mode in Dante Controller, older ones might not provide this. Note also that Dante Virtual Soundcard on Windows and OS X will not provide AES67, so you’d have to go entirely AES67 on a mixed PC platform setup.

#28

Uh that sounds like very poor performance. I have used DVS with 64 channels @10mS without issue repeatedly on a variety of older Mac hardware, and done live processing at lower latencies, but not sure if I have done large channel counts at lower latencies or not.

I would strongly disagree with this statement for the record. While 96k is unusual for most Dante systems it is not out of the question, for instance one of the Digico systems I put in recently can run Dante at 96k and track like that.

Technically that was announced years ago (Got announced last time I attended Infocomm, which was pre-COVID by I believe a couple years), and I believe exists and is in use. For instance the QSYS system that runs Linux also has a Dante software license you can purchase, which indicates to me that it may well already be in use. The problem of course being that they charge a licensing fee, and don’t seem to be interested in making a native DVS client, but letting others develop products off it to put in embedded systems that run linux (ie. that QSYS system I mentioned).

Seablade