20 Nov
2009
20 Nov
'09
5:07 p.m.
Hi all,
I am working on a project in which I want 5 musicians to walk around a
building and play. They will carry netbooks (mics and headphones) and
their signals will be sent to a concert hall where it will be
broadcasted. Additionally, a "conductor" will decide which individual
stream will every one of those 5 musicians listen to. So I need a
2-way communication on each netbook and 5 in and 5 out on the server.
The server will be wired.
I tried oggcasting but latencies were just unacceptable (10-20
seconds) so I started experimenting with jack.udp. I am getting very
promising results with one machine on a wired LAN and the other over
WiFi but I get a lot lost packets. I do not mind to loose some
quality and some stuttering and I don't mind some latency (although
jack wants to pump everything in real time) but the netbook that's on
WiFi has a lot of trouble even getting the audio data out or reliably
bringing it in, even in areas where WiFi signal is very strong.
I also tried NetJack but I cannot even establish a master/slave
relationship between 2 machines (if one is on a WiFi). Perhaps it
demands a reliable bandwidth? I am not sure, I did not spend much
time with it.
If anyone has any ideas or experience with something like this I would
appreciate any input. I tried ninjam today but somehow client refuses
to talk to alsa drivers, I will be investigating that in hope that it
will perform better than ices2+pd.
Try pulseaudio...and the best thing is you can do it all from the gui :D
remember to add the users to pulse-access pulse and pulse-rt groups
install pulseaudio zeroconf, avahi and x11 related packages
install padevchooser
remember you can always run the padevchooser remotely from/on the server
via ssh -X
in the padevchooser configuration dialog there is something like "show
device on the network" and to configure it as a server (for where the
audio will really run) or as a client where the audio will be
"manipulated"
in the settings for the clients there is also something to have the
devices looping so that you can listen them also locally
remember the server is where you listen and the client where you play,
like the Xserver, the client compute and the server does the job.
I've done this zillion times lately to show the possibility with freenx
and remote audio support, the latency is very minimal, i tested it with
all the latest ubuntu's from 8.04 (did not test on karmik yet) and even
flash in firefox was working( at very hi memory costs on the freenx server
)
AH! :D remember also you need to be in the same network or you'll need to
know about tunneling
Ciao