15 Aug
2004
15 Aug
'04
8:01 p.m.
On Sunday 15 August 2004 06:48, phil(a)plus24.com wrote:
The current top Ethernet standard specifies max
transmission speed of
10GBit/sec - 1394b is 800MBit/sec.
You can also run Ethernet over Firewire. IIRC the max. number of
devices on a 1394 chain is 63 making Ethernet more suitable for large
clusters of interconnected MIDI workstations.
But to an extent arguing over which PHY layer is like a Vi / Emacs
flamewar.
[plug]
For a working example of a MIDI over Ethernet (and UDP) have a look at
IEEE P1639 (was called DMIDI):
www.plus24.com/ieeep1639
This acts as a bridge between ALSA and the network so all MIDI apps can
bounce MIDI data between remote machines without any code changes.
I tried this myself, on a 100mbit ethernet switch.. while for single
instruments it seems okay, and latency is fine, playing full complex midi
pieces in realtime had a lot of jittering.. I did packet monitoring and it
all seemed ok (all the network traffic was for midi).. I'm suspecting that
it may be related to the network card or driver doing some sort of buffering..
but I cant really tell.. any experiences about this?
Cheers!
Juan Linietsky
I'm also working on an embedded Linux for
clustering audio workstations,
Live CD available (USB mouse support broken just for now, PS/2 OK):
www/plus24.com/m-dist
This is also a call for participation in the final development of the
standard as well as application development.
Regards
Phil
On Sunday, August 15, 2004, at 09:36 am, Steve Harris wrote:
But if youre going to do that, why use ethernet? You'd need dedicated
NICs
and switches, so you may as well use firewire, which has dedicated
realtime channels, more bandwidth and doesnt require switching. 400meg
Firewire cards are down to about 7 or 8 euros in the UK now.
The only disadvantage is that you can't (right now) cheaply run firewire
over long distances, but taht will change once firewire over CAT5 cards
come down in price, and this is rarely an issue with clusters anyway.