A very late reply to the Dante thing⌠Things didnât 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. â 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.
Thereâs 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 doesnât 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 wouldnât be good enough for a 24channel/96khz recording studio setup. Iâd 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 wouldnât 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 youâve understood a few basic things. Note that ES67 interoperability is a feature of the Dante devices. So far all recent devices Iâve 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 youâd have to go entirely AES67 on a mixed PC platform setup.