AVB Network Data Streaming Capabilities

[aronb]

Hi,

Does Flowstone have the capability of working and interfacing to AVB Networking / Data Streams?

For example, see: https://motu.com/products/avb/1248/networking.html
and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging

This would be a very useful protocol for Flowstone (an extension of 802.1 "Audio Video Bridging" > AVB), and would open up the input and output capabilities to a very wide range of pro-audio products.

The AVB protocol is basically a time stamped network packet (if I understand it correctly), and thus can be used to send audio data across a network to a remote location (mixing room to / from studio to / from remote artists, etc.). And as long as network switches are used which support the AVB protocol, standard network cable can be used to send and receive streaming audio data over long distances easily.

Aron

[trogluddite]

For the example MOTU devices, it might be possible to support the remote control part of it directly in FlowStone, but not the audio data streams. Although the audio devices interconnect via AVB, and there is a "bridge" network connection for allowing remote control, the audio streams are delivered to the computer via a regular audio driver connected to USB/Thunderbolt - presumably to allow dedicated hardware for extracting the streams and to guarantee a "sanitised" network carrying only synchronised AVB traffic.

In general, the AVB data should be little different to working with any other kind of network packets, but encoding/decoding the audio packets using FlowStone's network primitives and 'green' string manipulation would be far too slow to cope with real time audio streams, and the 'green' components run in a CPU thread which is too low priority to allow accurate enough timing. A C++ DLL would be needed at the very least, to act as the "audio driver" (unless there is a general-purpose AVB -> ASIO driver out there somewhere?)

[aronb]

Trog,

Thanks , I will do a bit more searching - already found a device I never knew existed!

Aron