writing audio directly to a Digi 003

[arunchandra1954]

My college has just bought a ProTools LE system with a Digi003 which directly outputs to an 8-channel surround speaker system we have built into a classroom.

This is a classroom designed to teach programming in C for multi-channel audio.

Question: is it possible for the student workstations to write audio directly to to the 003, by-passing the ProTools software?

The classroom is designed for 25 students, and currently, things are setup so that the students submit their eight, single channel soundfiles to the teacher, who then plays them out via protools into the classroom.

It would preferable if the students themselves could be taught how to address the hardware directly, and send the output to ProTools.

Thanks very much,

Arun Chandra

[flommer]

Originally Posted by arunchandra1954

My college has just bought a ProTools LE system with a Digi003 which directly outputs to an 8-channel surround speaker system we have built into a classroom.

This is a classroom designed to teach programming in C for multi-channel audio.

Question: is it possible for the student workstations to write audio directly to to the 003, by-passing the ProTools software?

The classroom is designed for 25 students, and currently, things are setup so that the students submit their eight, single channel soundfiles to the teacher, who then plays them out via protools into the classroom.

It would preferable if the students themselves could be taught how to address the hardware directly, and send the output to ProTools.

Thanks very much,

Arun Chandra

I don't think your question is making sense, based on the capability of the 003.

You cannot "write audio directly to" the 003, as it has no recording capability by itself. It is only an interface to facilitate audio passing to and from the host computer, which I guess is the teacher's.

Perhaps you don't really mean to "write" the audio to the 003, but instead to use it as some kind of networked capable audio output device where any enabled user could simply use that device as their output interface.

As far as I know there is no way to do that. It may be that there is some kind of software which would be installed on the host computer that could act as a network audio interface. In other words, the network client (student) would stream the audio to the host computer (teacher) and that PC would use the 003 for multi channel output. It seems that there would be some tricky permissions issues to deal with as well as the fact that if you are already using ProTools as your editor/recorder then PT won't make use of that. (Maybe PT9? Can it use audio over ethernet?)

Sounds like your programmers should look into it

What is your process for submitting the files to the teacher? If the teacher had each students audio files folder as a share in their workspace window then that might speed up that process. I'm not too familiar with how well ProTools handles network shares.. It might not be as easy as I'm thinking..

A final option would be to have a pretty serious audio switcher that could handle 8ch x (25 students + 1 teacher)...208 channels.. ouch! Or don't the individual students have 8ch output?

[arunchandra1954]

thanks for your response --- you've understood the problem correctly.

Optimally, it would be lovely if a programming interface already existed for the DIGI 003, as, for example, the portaudio interface to a number of different audio i/o devices.

Assuming that one doesn't already exist, there is a group of people here that's willing to work on writing one.

Has anyone tried adapting the portaudio interface to work with the DIGI 003?

Or is there another audio interface that allows one to communicate directly with the DIGI 003?

Arun

[sunburst79]

As a workaround you might want to have the students save their project files to a common networked drive or share. This would at least make it easier for you the teacher to access each project and play it back from the 003.

[arunchandra1954]

Originally Posted by sunburst79

As a workaround you might want to have the students save their project files to a common networked drive or share. This would at least make it easier for you the teacher to access each project and play it back from the 003.

thanks, but that's our current strategy already. it works, but it's cumbersome, and the students don't have a chance to learn how to do it themselves.

Arun

[Darryl Ramm]

By "do it themselves" you mean run Pro Tools themselves? Without that they are just using some custom program to send out 8 tracks of audio. Not much to learn in that I guess.

One possibility is to let the students put their files on a shared folder on the instructors Mac and then use remote screen sharing and let them drive Pro Tools. You'll have to see how well (or badly... ) you can get this to work in practice and shake things out. You also want to look out for too many folks accessing the shared drive while its being used by Pro Tools.

Personally this sounds less than ideal to me. And the last thing I'd want to do is let students play audio or grab a screen etc. on the central/instructors Mac from their own Macs. What is wrong with letting them go to that instructors Mac and play their files from there.

Darryl

[arunchandra1954]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

By "do it themselves" you mean run Pro Tools themselves? Without that they are just using some custom program to send out 8 tracks of audio. Not much to learn in that I guess.

One possibility is to let the students put their files on a shared folder on the instructors Mac and then use remote screen sharing and let them drive Pro Tools. You'll have to see how well (or badly... ) you can get this to work in practice and shake things out. You also want to look out for too many folks accessing the shared drive while its being used by Pro Tools.

Personally this sounds less than ideal to me. And the last thing I'd want to do is let students play audio or grab a screen etc. on the central/instructors Mac from their own Macs. What is wrong with letting them go to that instructors Mac and play their files from there.

Darryl

Darryl,

thanks very much, but the point is for the students to learn how to output directly from C, rather than going through a software package. I want them to learn the underlying principles governing audio output in 8-channels.

Arun

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by arunchandra1954

Darryl,

thanks very much, but the point is for the students to learn how to output directly from C, rather than going through a software package. I want them to learn the underlying principles governing audio output in 8-channels.

Arun

Your going to have to write your own driver.

[Darryl Ramm]

I am lost and not really following what you are really trying to do or are saying.

Are the students on Macs or PCs? I'm assuming Macs... (since the instructor has a Mac).

Output directly from C to what? The 003 interface is not directly connected to the student Macs. You used Portaudio as an example. That's just a portable audio interface abstraction layer, it runs on Macs (on top of CoreAudio) but it won't get you a remote/streaming connection to an audio interface. Right? And since you are running on Macs you have native CoreAudio available to develop to. Portaudio is not going to get you anything more on the Mac platform that just using the native CoreAudio so I'm not sure why you want to use it unless there are cross platform portability reasons. What am I missing here?

Since there is a CoreAudio driver for the 003 you can talk to it directly or though portaudio if you really want to. Now how will you get eight channels of audio there?

Do you want to copy the student programs and audio files or whatever over to the instructors computer and run it there? How will they debug etc. on their own Macs that don't have 8 outputs? (you could write a dummy CoreAudio driver, but yeesh...).

Or do you mean they are going to stream over the network to the instructors Mac? Maybe going to hack on Darwin Steaming Server or a similar server? That question is not specific to the 003 so where you thinking of developing or having the students do that? I don't think AirPlay APIs are exposed on OS X to use that route (and there is the questions of handling 8 channels of (presumably LPCM?)). The students are supposed to develop this infrastructure software? Or is it going to be provided to them?. Are they supposed to be learning about streaming media/networking or about multichannel/surround sound processing or something else? Writing surround sound codecs? surround sounds DSP? Like I said I'm fairly lost here...

I am really lost on what you are doing but one possible thing to consider are using small interfaces with ADAT out for each Mac and cable that via a TOSLINK switcher to the ADAT in on the 003. e.g. RME Babyface or others... Pretty clunky but it gets you 8 channels from every Mac and the ability to develop locally to an interface with CoreAudio even if the students cannot hear the 8 channels locally. Presumably they use headphones for development work. Then use Pro Tools to route the ADAT to analog out on the 003. You'll really want to test this out to find all the stuff that works reliably together.

Seems like something like a Dante Ethernet based devices and the Focusrite Rednet or similar boxes might have been easier to work with (but again I'm lost what exactly the goal and details are). I've never touched a Rednet, but would like to.

My head hurts.

Darryl