[LAD] FOSS Ethernet Soundcard

Karl Hammar karl at aspodata.se
Tue Nov 24 08:48:53 UTC 2009


Adrian Knoth:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 08:28:03PM +0000, Folderol wrote:
> 
> > The rationale in brief:
> > No proprietry hardware soundcard needed.
> > Almost all modern computers have reasonably fast Ethernet connections.
> 
> Don't know how much you already did for the hardware layout. If
> possible, try to avoid analog stuff, that is, ADC/DAC.

You don't say why we should avoid analog stuff.
For me the whole point of doing this is the analog stuff.

...
> I'm also somewhat interested in the network part, I feel IPv6 could help
> a lot. It supports autoconfiguration and it has decent multicast
> support, so it would be possible to broadcast/multicast the streams on
> the net (LAN). This could be useful if you want to access the stream at
> a mixing console for a life setup and simultaneously record it on a
> computer.

At a live recording you probably have only your own gear connected to 
the lan. In that case you can easily assign ip-adresses at will and to 
your own taste. I don't see how IPv6 vs. IPv4 could matter at all.

> That's basically what Roland's Digital Snake offers: an onstage Ethernet
> (not IP) soundcard and one or more remote devices. RockNet provides
> similar stuff, there's also Ethersound, but RockNet is PC-incompatible
> (400MBit/s proprietary protocol), Roland is undocumented and I don't
> know nothing about Ethersound. ;)

That tells us that it should be doable. But of cause we want an open 
protocol. Do you know the capacity limits of thoose systems ?

> I also have some fancy Xilinx boards with onboard ethernet, an audio
> codec (including the analog jacks) and a FPGA. Though it's way harder to
> mimic all the features with VHDL, it could provide stable timings. The
> boards also support memory, so it would be possible to load a softcore
> and run Linux on them.

Doing things with a fpga would certainly be interesting, but I cannot 
do it for the moment. Perhaps you could provide designs we could 
include...

> If you like, feel free to Cc me or join #lad if you think I could
> contribute something.

I assume you are on the list, so I only send on the list.

Regards,
/Karl

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