Beginning with Dante

iLive Archived iLive Discussions
1

I got my Dante card today. I’ve installed it, the Dante Controller and Virtual Sound Card. Things mostly seem to be working, but there are some odd things. I’m playing back some multitrack recordings.

My configuration is:

  • Dante Virtual Sound Card is set for 16 x 16 channels, 48K, 6ms latency.

  • Source recordings are 44.1K, being played back in Mackie Tracktion

  • Tracktion shows the Dante outputs as outputs Dante tx 0 through Dante tx 15.

  • Mix-Rack (iDR-32) set with Inputs 1 - 16 having sources Port B Dante channels 1-16.

The following (in italics) seems to be fixed now. I reset the latency to 10ms and the DVC said I needed to reset all of the subscriptions. I did so and then noticed that about half of the channels were not making it through. I shut down Tracktion, reset all the subscriptions, and then restarted Tracktion. Now all of the channels are flowing.

The track that is assigned to Dante tx 0, which should be on Port B Dante Channel 1, is not registering signal. I tried routing it to a different strip, still no signal. If I route the track to Dante tx 15, it shows up correctly on Port B channel 16.

  • There’s a significant amount of crackles. I’ve listened to the tracks directly on the computer and there are no dropouts in the recordings. I’m listening via the PAFL headphone output on the mixrack directly.

  • Is there a simple way to switch all of the Port B channels to the appropriate strips? Going through one at a time is painful.

iLive T80/32/Dante

2

Grrrr.

I was letting it play through a while. All of a sudden the first 10 channels just stopped flowing.

The Dante Controller changed from green checks to yellow exclamation-mark triangles.

The Events shows two events:

  • Timed out 3 times awaiting a reply to message 'Versions" from (pc name), giving up.

  • Device AllenHth-0600d3 is now a grandmaster

Both of these were timestamped about 10 minutes before it dropped the flows. Pressing the “Reload device information” button on Dante Controller brought the missing channels back.

iLive T80/32/Dante

3

confirm crackles - Samplitude DAW shows them as errors. Every couple of seconds.

Drivers and software stable so far.

idr48 - T112

iPad - Notebook with Editor

Belkin Wireless

Dante … whenever ready

Dedicated recording PC with Samplitude

4
quote:
Originally posted by johnse

  • There’s a significant amount of crackles. I’ve listened to the tracks directly on the computer and there are no dropouts in the recordings. I’m listening via the PAFL headphone output on the mixrack directly.

  • Is there a simple way to switch all of the Port B channels to the appropriate strips? Going through one at a time is painful.

Best to describe your exact network setup:

which cable, how long, which router etc. and contact support…

Switching the Dante input to the appropriate channels? If you don’t have a surface, best create two scenes: “computer” and “mixrack”, store the assignments there, and create a soft button for both of them.

cheers,

5

1 Meter Cat5 - directly linked with no router between from idr to laptop with gigabit port.

I will try with different latencies to reduce dropouts.

its even with just 1 track recording - doesnt depend on the number of tracks active

idr48 - T112

iPad - Notebook with Editor

Belkin Wireless

Dante … whenever ready

Dedicated recording PC with Samplitude

6

Crackles during playback?

Could be a samplerate error? Check you are synced. The idr should be the master clock and dante should be slave.

I had this once with a soundcraft vi6, turned out to be my interface set to the wrong samplerate.

GW

www.TotalLiveSound.com

7

That’s what it will most likely be! 44.1 doesn’t fit into 48khz! Even 48khz doesn’t fit into 48khz if they aren’t sync’d.

Cheers

Richard Howey

Audio Dynamite Ltd

IDR48/IDR16/T112/R72/Mixpad

8

My Configuration:

iDR-32 MixRack, Dante in Port B

iLive T80 surface (not using in these tests)

Laptop:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Core i7 M640 2.8GHz

8 GB RAM, 750GB 7200RPM hard disk

Laptop built by ADK Pro Audio

Gigabit network port

Windows 7 Tablet (ASUS ep121)

Running iLive Editor

Core i5 U470 1.33Ghz

Windows 7 x64 Home

Connected via WiFi to iDR-32 control network via Belden N600 HD (i.e. separate network from the Dante network)

Dante Virtual Sound Card settings:

Audio Format 48000 Hz, 24 bit

Dante latency 6ms

ASIO settings 2048 buffer size, 10ms ASIO latency

16 x 16 channels

No routers at all…direct connection between Laptop and Dante Primary Port

Tried 1 meter cat 6 direct between laptop and Dante Primary port. Also 150’ Belden Datatuff Cat5E cable with Neutrik Ethercon connectors. Laptop end uses the 1M cat6 as a pigtail between a Neutrik Ethercon through connector and the laptop since the laptop does NOT have Neutrik-compatible jack :smiley:

Tried un-installing and reinstalling DVS since Dante Controller had stopped being able to get configuration information from it. After the re-install and activating the license, I got a BSOD: STOP: 0x000000B8 (0xFFFFF80002E64CC0, 0XFFFFFA800B0D98A0, 0X0000000000000000, 0X0000000000000000)

That may have something to do with having the WiFi adapter connected (for activating the sound card)

Trying again…

Now Dante Controller sees the status of the DVC.

*** I think I’ve gotten rid of the crackles ***

I had not previously selected the “Slave to external word clock”. Now I have Dante slaved to the iDR-32

HOWEVER, I still seem to be losing sync between the Laptop and Mixrack every few minutes.

When this occurs, the green checks on the Controller turn into yellow triangles with exclamations, but there is no corresponding entry in the Events tab.

Clicking the Reload device information button resets them to green checks, and reconnects the flows that had disconnected.

Sometimes the controller will go to the triangles WITHOUT the signal being lost.

I just had another instance of it losing connection. This time, however, clicking Reload did not recover the connection. It reset itself partially after a minute or so, but I had to shut down DVC a couple of times (and also disconnected and reconnected the network cable before I got the connection back. Some channels were connecting, but others had dropped out.

Running DPC Latency Checker V1.1.0 shows an average latency of 500us. Somtimes spiking to 700-800us, never getting as high as 1ms.

I’m going to try booting into my stripped-down boot config and try again (hopefully I can activate DVS in the other boot config on the same computer!)

iLive T80/32/Dante

9

Stix: I’m pretty sure that Tracktion transcodes on the fly between 44.1K and 48K, and since I slaved Dante to the iDR-32, I’ve not had the crackles.

iLive T80/32/Dante

10

Did test yesterday evening:

connection:

(Dante and IDR32 network) – TL-1043ND router – Computer

Flawless performance so far with these settings:

Dante Virtual Sound Card settings:

Audio Format 48000 Hz, 24 bit

Dante latency 4ms

ASIO settings 128 buffer size, 3ms ASIO latency

32 x 32 channels

32 bit audio encoding

11

Found out that these “crackles” only appear on channels that are not connected on IDR but recorded in DAW. Never saw them on a channel with any input connected.

What kind of DAW software do you use ? @all

idr48 - T112

iPad

Belkin Wireless

Dante

Lenovo i5 laptop with Samplitude V10

12

Cubase SX

Computer with older AMD X2 processor.

32 channel recording.

PC not really optimized for recording. Couldn’t handle 64 channel recording due to VST overload, not Dante’s fault.

As said, flawless results recording and playing back 32 channels with the settings as shown above.

Wouter

13

I finally got this working correctly.

I restored my laptop to the configuration originally set up by ADK Pro Audio. This resulted in idle DPC Latencies in the 50-80us range. I was able to get solid connection with no dropouts. I used the default ASIO settings with 128 sample buffers.

Recording to an external drive via eSATA connection, I was able to run 8.5 hours of loopback recording (15 channels out from PC to MixRack, same 15 channels back to the PC).

This was using Mackie’s Tracktion.

When I attempted to set up a 64 channel test, Tracktion started giving me errors when I enabled too many channels to the ASIO driver (I think that was the problem…I didn’t track it down). I downloaded Reaper instead.

NOTE: Reaper 64-bit version will not talk to Dante Virtual Sound Card 64-bit. You must use the 32-bit version of Reaper instead. This ran fine on 64-bit Windows 7. Once I got that straightened out, they started working fine.

I set up a test of 15 channels out of Reaper. I then replicated the inputs 4 times within the MixRack routing so that I had 60 tracks coming back.

This ran fine. DPC latencies were averaging in the 300-400us range, with peaks just above 500.

iLive T80/32/Dante

14

So I finally got my Dante card today & after an initial install which for some reason failed to show up my PC in the available devices for routing I have reinstalled it tonight, figured out how to route the audio out of my iDR32 to 32 inputs of Reaper (64bit edition!), run nearly half an hour of glitch free recording (admittedly for this first test I’ve armed 32 channels in Reaper but only fed a stereo signal from my iPod down 2 lines) - no dropouts, no crackles or weird noises present on the empty inputs - and fed the stereo mix from Reaper back to the iDR32 on inputs 63 & 64 with no issues.

So far so good!

iDR32 mixrack

MixRack for iPad & Tweak for iPhone apps

Asus N61 Laptop (x2 wireless) with Belkin PlayMax N600 HD router

Sennheiser IEM (for PFL)

Dante card (soon!)

15
quote:
Originally posted by Biggsounds

So I finally got my Dante card today & after an initial install which for some reason failed to show up my PC in the available devices for routing I have reinstalled it tonight, figured out how to route the audio out of my iDR32 to 32 inputs of Reaper (64bit edition!), run nearly half an hour of glitch free recording (admittedly for this first test I’ve armed 32 channels in Reaper but only fed a stereo signal from my iPod down 2 lines) - no dropouts, no crackles or weird noises present on the empty inputs - and fed the stereo mix from Reaper back to the iDR32 on inputs 63 & 64 with no issues.

So far so good!

iDR32 mixrack

Hi bogsounds, Glad to hear you finally got the card and that it’s working fine. I’m gona do it too when the cash comes in.

Jim

MixRack for iPad & Tweak for iPhone apps

Asus N61 Laptop (x2 wireless) with Belkin PlayMax N600 HD router

Sennheiser IEM (for PFL)

Dante card (soon!)

R72 & IDR32

16

Sorry Biggsounds, spellcheck got me again on your username.

J

R72 & IDR32

17

Bogsounds - specialists in swampy blues rock production… Tony Joe White anyone?

Jim, I’d totally recommend it - drop me an email if you want to talk shop…

iDR32 mixrack

MixRack for iPad & Tweak for iPhone apps

Asus N61 Laptop (x2 wireless)

Windows 7 Pro 64bit

with Belkin PlayMax N600 HD router

Sennheiser IEM (for PFL)

Dante card

18

Bogsounds … very cool indeed[:smile: ][:smile: ][:smile: ]

bogsound studios “we swamp you up” (howsat)

we own 35 akg d12`s for your real sound…

cheers

dave

allen&heath iLive-144 /idr 10 / idr 48 /dante (i want midi in dante!)

19

D12’s and ribbon mikes… nothing but the dullest tones for your show… specially blown horns for the midrangiest top end ever

iDR32 mixrack

MixRack for iPad & Tweak for iPhone apps

Asus N61 Laptop (x2 wireless)

Windows 7 Pro 64bit

with Belkin PlayMax N600 HD router

Sennheiser IEM (for PFL)

Dante card

20

So apart from my new project recording the swampiest and dullest tones south of the delta, I’ve also been testing the Dante card…

So far I’m happy to report totally hassle free recording - I left the machine running last night & tracked 32 tracks in (a dozen mike lines with the gain wide open, a stereo iPod track, and a bunch of empty channels to see if I had any of the clicks and pops mentioned by others) with Reaper 64bit v3.76 to an external RAID1 enclosure via eSATA and it didn’t miss a trick.

I’ll have to go through and detail my exact specs so anyone with issues can try and get these same settings to work, but at the moment I’m feeling pretty confident in the card’s performance!

iDR32 mixrack

MixRack for iPad & Tweak for iPhone apps

Asus N61 Laptop (x2 wireless)

Windows 7 Pro 64bit

with Belkin PlayMax N600 HD router

Sennheiser IEM (for PFL)

Dante card

UPDATE: I recorded 32 tracks into Reaper for 3 solid hours on the weekend at a show & it didn’t skip a beat (except for when the whole venue’s power went out for 5 minutes… bloody fridges and bain maries!!! Even then it found the DVC straight away and went back to recording without breaking a sweat once the power to the rack was restored)… I’m increasingly impressed with this card!!!