[linux-audio-dev] Audio over Ethernet?

Francois Dechelle Francois.Dechelle at ircam.fr
Wed Apr 14 16:08:37 UTC 2004


Hi,

Interesting project...

Most of the protocols (RTP and others) that have been mentionned in the
replies are on top of TCP or UDP and thus are not adapted for your real
time application. Either ethernet or 1394 would be more adapted.

IIUC, you don't need some kind of load balancing between the machines,
i.e. the applications will be assigned statically on the different nodes
without any dynamic job creation/deletion?

fd

Le mer 14/04/2004 à 09:47, Anders Torger a écrit :
> On Tuesday 13 April 2004 19.17, Anders Torger wrote:
> > Is there any work done for transporting digital audio over ethernet?
> > For example a library, an open standard or something?
> >
> > /Anders Torger
> 
> Thanks for the replies. However, I should have specified in more detail 
> what I am after, I mean something like cobranet, but without the need 
> for special hardware.
> 
> I'm thinking about trying to transfer digital audio over ethernet, with 
> the goal of being able to build a convolver cluster. The idea is to 
> have one computer with say a 24 channel sound card, and to that connect 
> a set of other computers through ethernet (100 megabit or gigabit 
> depending on requirements).
> 
> The inputs taken from the sound card is broadcasted on the ethernet so 
> all other computers in the cluster get the inputs, and they send their 
> convolved outputs back to the sound card computer, whose only task is 
> to mix together the result, and put it to the sound card outputs.
> 
> One application when this type of design would be suitable is WFS (Wave 
> Front Synthesis), with moving sources in simulated reverb, something 
> which is extremely demanding (one 3 GHz Pentium 4 can handle only one 
> source for a 24 channel system).
> 
> Say if you build such a system with 10 cluster nodes plus the sound card 
> machine, you could render 10 dynamic WFS sources, but would have to 
> distribute 10 channels from the sound card machine, and get back 10 * 
> 24, which would be ~20 megabits/s broadcasted from the sound card 
> machine to the cluster nodes, and ~400 megabits/s back. One channel is 
> 48 kHz 32 bit floating point, that is ~1.5 megabit/s.
> 
> Thus, I think it is necessary to implement something operating on the 
> ethernet level to get best performance in terms of throughput and 
> latency.
> 
> /Anders Torger
> 




More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list