Dante Virtual Soundcard

Steviebone · 09-12-2018, 07:28 PM

Anyone have any experience with this?

https://www.audinate.com/products/so...tual-soundcard

sodium · 09-12-2018, 08:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steviebone

Anyone have any experience with this?

https://www.audinate.com/products/so...tual-soundcard

Sure do. Love it. Running out of a Yamaha O1V96 to PC on a Cat6 cable. . Super low latency. Rock solid performance. Highly recommended

Steviebone · 09-12-2018, 10:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sodium

Sure do. Love it. Running out of a Yamaha O1V96 to PC on a Cat6 cable. . Super low latency. Rock solid performance. Highly recommended

Thank you. I'm about to give it a test run on 4 PC's.

mschnell · 09-13-2018, 12:47 AM

As Sodium does not seem to use it in a PC->PC installation, please let us know about your findings.

-Michael

JSMastering · 09-13-2018, 01:06 AM

Possibly a dumber question...does Dante VSC/Via require it's own network or will it work on a pre-existing one?

cyrano · 09-13-2018, 02:02 AM

You need a Dante compatible switch. It needs to support QOS for audio.

Gerrit · 09-13-2018, 02:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyrano

You need a Dante compatible switch. It needs to support QOS for audio.

No you don't. You need a managed switch so you can tweak QOS settings if you have a lot of other stuff going over the network but any switch will do. I use an Allied Telesis GS950/8POE switch for my Dante network, never configured anything on the switch and it's working flawless for over two years now.

mschnell · 09-13-2018, 02:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyrano

You need a Dante compatible switch. It needs to support QOS for audio.

I do know QOS ("Quality of service") that allows to set a priority for certain streams. But I never heard of a dedicated "QOS for audio". I f this really does exist as a separate standard, supposedly very few switches will support it. But I think any QOS enabled switch should be able to be configured for the priority of Dante streams.

OTOH, if no QOS is in place there should be rather rare problems if the network branches used are not busy with other stuff. Hence i believe, Gigabit provided, dedicating a single switch to the Dante devices and hook that to the rest of the network to same with a single cable should yield decent results for semi-pro installations.

-Michael

SonicAxiom · 09-13-2018, 05:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSMastering

Possibly a dumber question...does Dante VSC/Via require it's own network or will it work on a pre-existing one?

Dante can work using existing networking infrastructure (Switches, cables). However, as I pointed out in my previous post, the optimal config is using manageable gigabit switches and cat5 or cat6 cabling. Some Dante devices (mostly those providing 64 or more audio channels) may refuse to connect to other peers if those are only reachable via megabit networking connections. Getting a recent manageable (second hand) gigabit switch is no big investment.

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JSMastering · 09-13-2018, 07:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SonicAxiom

Dante can work using existing networking infrastructure (Switches, cables). However, as I pointed out in my previous post, the optimal config is using manageable gigabit switches and cat5 or cat6 cabling. Some Dante devices (mostly those providing 64 or more audio channels) may refuse to connect to other peers if those are only reachable via megabit networking connections. Getting a recent manageable (second hand) gigabit switch is no big investment.

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People still use 10baseT?

Anyway...that (and your other post) sounds encouraging. My desires are actually pretty straightforward compared to what people are doing with Dante. I just couldn't find the right networking documentation in the hour or so I spent on it...it was all sales pitches instead of actual information.

I might have to look into that in the future...it seems like the prices are in the same ballpark for MADI or AES but with more channels.

Does it deal well with changing sample rates, assuming the ADCs/DACs involved do?

woogish · 09-16-2018, 09:23 PM

nope.......

mschnell · 09-16-2018, 09:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by woogish

nope.......

Thanks for this very enlightening and in-depth comment.

-Michael

davesnothere · 10-17-2018, 05:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steviebone

Anyone have any experience with this?

https://www.audinate.com/products/so...tual-soundcard

yes I have a Yamaha tf1 with Dante card installed with a 16X8 Dante snake box. I use the Yamaha board for monitoring during tracking. I use a cheap unmanaged switch I bought at Walmart. It works well.

computer has DVS+controller

The Yamaha mixer is the clock master.

otb · 02-04-2021, 12:04 AM

Bumping this. Just found this and there is so much info here, before I get too deep..

Would Dante help this?
- I have my beefy studio computer in the control room. Ethernet is in walls.
- I want to have a lighter laptop I can patch to Ethernet so I can access Reaper projects, save them on my studio PC, and also possibly playback through the Laptop converters on my other speakers in another room.

I’ve been using a portable drive for years, but I just end up backing up with multiple saved files across different places, at different states of completion. Also I can’t work on same mixes on laptop as the Processing power isn’t there, as well as plugins. It would be nice to stay on the studio computer HD’s.

SonicAxiom · 02-04-2021, 06:11 AM

It seems to me that what you are describing may be more about data networking than audio networking. To be able to work on the same project data on two different computers you don't need audio networking but just a simple data networking connection. Audio networking like Dante has huge advantages when you are dealing with numerous multichannel audio devices that have to be aggregated and high channel counts that need to get routed between those devices which are possibly located at multiple distant locations.

Obviously, Dante can be useful in a smaller environment, too, due to its ease of expandability and the massive channel count capacity of a single cat6A cable.

If you wanna be able to open your Reaper projects on both machines, make sure that they are connected via ethernet and that you have the necessary network shares established and working. You can then access project data on a centralized network share from both machines without using audio-over-IP. You just need two audio devices - one for each computer - as well as a monitoring device for each workstation.

If the processing power is not huge on the laptop, you can still open large projects on it and then use something like AudioGridder to outsource plugin processing to the more powerful machine. The plugins only need to be installed on the big computer. Note that AudioGridder is still a very new project and still has some quirks.

If you decide to work on the same project data it might still be beneficial to make a dedicated local copy of that data with a dedicated local project file because of the differing requirements and settings with regard to a project that is worked on on two different machines.

If you wanna send a mix from one machine to the other room for monitoring purposes, several solutions exist to accomplish this. Doing this with audio-over-IP would probably be the most convenient solution (maybe using the AVIO USB adapter fed via the Voxengo Recorder plugin on the sending side in conjunction with Dante Virtual Soundcard on the receiving pc). The actual solution depends on your precise local necessities and setup conditions.

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otb · 02-04-2021, 04:19 PM

Wow! Thanks for the amazing knowledge! Ok now I see how Dante is more for long snakes and growing IO. Last year was wishing I could aggregate two interfaces each with ADAT already being maxed out on dual computers. Dante would have been ideal it looks like. I will look into those suggestions for networking. Thanks a ton!

SonicAxiom · 02-04-2021, 04:41 PM

you're welcome

It is possible to make a fairly smooth transition from traditional audio connections to Dante by adding a Dante bridging device like the Ferrofish VERTO32 to your existing system so that you don't have to get rid of what you already own. The VERTO bridges up to 4 8-channel ADAT devices of existing ADAT gear (up to 32 channels in total) to Dante (bin-directionally). On the other end, a computer running Dante Virtual Soundcard or Dante Via or a computer fitted with a Dante PCIe card can then pick up all those aggregated channels. Of course, you can also route channels back out from the DAW to the ADAT devices via the VERTO on a channel-by-channel basis purely via software (Dante Controller).

The differences are in the achievable latencies and the max. channel counts. DVS and Via have higher latency than the PCIe card (like 15-20 ms rtl vs. 3-6 ms rtl). DVS can send/receive up to 64 audio channels, while Dante Via can send/receive up to 48 but it can also Dante-fy audio applications running on that computer. The Dante PCIe card has lowest latency and offers 128 Dante audio in/outs.

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