Ghost in the Machine: Me Vs. a Dante Network

A few months ago, I think it was early March, I went to help a church get some problems with their Dante audio network sorted out.  (Yes, I need to write more often- don't worry,  Mom says the same thing.) They currently have a Yamaha M7CL with two Dante-MY16-AUD cards connected to a Cisco switch, which is connected to another switch in their production room. The two Dante cards handle 16 channels of audio each, so that they can get all 32 channels to their recording room. Their production machine is a Mac Pro running Apple's Logic software.

In full disclosure, let me make the following statements:

1. I should have payed more attention in NET 125 Networking Basics. But the material was super dry and let's face it.  That's not the sexy side of playing with all of this awesome audio gear. Am I right?
2. I know people that have fairly complex Dante networks that are working beautifully. For example there is a local college that is cramming audio through their regular infrastructure. Meaning there are multi-channel strings of audio swimming in the same stream with college students streaming Downton Abbey, The Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Walker Texas Ranger. It works.
3. Dante works beautifully, and is almost completely "plug and play" on consoles that run Dante natively (that don't need an expansion card) like Yamaha's new CL series consoles and Rio stageboxes.
4. I typically dislike thing that take a lot of effort to set up. Let me get to what I came to do as quickly as possible. Which is usually mixing.

The Problem

In this particular case, the problem was that the same audio data would show up on channel 1 & 17, 2 & 18, 3 & 19 and so on inside Logic.

So I went through a few quick trouble shooting steps:

1. I looked at the direct output routing on the M7CL. Everything was patched one to one just as it should be.  Direct Out 1 was patched to Card Slot 2, Output 1-  Direct Out 2 was patched to Card Slot 2 Output 2. (the Dante Cards were in slots 2 & 3) That was all good.
2. I looked at the matrix in Dante Controller on the Mac. Again everything was patched beautifully.
3. I looked at the patching in Logic. 1 to 1, 2 to 2.

In theory, everything should work beautifully. It was time to dig deeper. We fired up Dante Controller on the Mac and took a look at the device info and network status.  This is where things got crazy.

Both of the Dante-MY16-AUD showed up in the device list, but only one had an IP address.  So we unplugged the cards one at a time from the network and each one showed up just fine. Then we plugged the second card in. The network assigned the second card the same IP address. That *might* explain the duplicated audio.

We took a quick look at Yamaha's and Audinate's (Dante's parent company) websites to see what the current firmware versions for the Dante Cards, and software.  We were a few versions behind. So we went through the process of updating Dante Virtual Soundcard the production machine, and my laptop, Dante Controller, and the cards in the M7.

We connected everything back up- aaaannnnd....(insert drum roll here) problem not solved. We were still getting duplicate data. If we manually assigned IP address one card wouldn't show up.  It was 3:30 in the afternoon. I had been at the church since 9:30. I had exhausted all of my options except one. Update the firmware on the M7CL. Unfortunately the church had a big production coming up and didn't want to do that and risk losing all of their scene data. I had to concede defeat and return home.

~Andy

Recording From Your Digital Console: Yamaha and Dante- Pt. 1 Configuring the Console

Link to Gabriel's photo stream

The Rig

Now it's time to figure out how to do all of this with a Yamaha digital console, and a Dante network.

The computer of choice will be a 2010 model 13" MacBook Pro running OS X 10.7.5 "Lion." All of the Audio will be pumped into Pro Tools 10.

Our console today will be a Yamaha LS9-32 with two Dante MY 16-AUD Dante Network Cards. These are 16 channel network audio cards. They'll allow us to send 32 audio channels to our computer via CAT5 cable.  We're also going to need a Gigabit Ethernet switch. This will allow us to connect the two Dante cards to the audio network, then use Dante Virtual Soundcard on our computer. We wouldn't have to do quite as much work if we were using one of the newer CL series consoles with a Rio stagebox.

There's a few things to note here-

1. I'm not going to go into every single detail- for eample installing the cards into the console is pretty easy. The guides on the Yamaha website cover that. I just want to touch a few things that might get missed along the way.
2. This process might work on the first try for you. Or it might not.  I've had clients that haven't had any issues with a Dante set up. Then I've seen Dante networks collapse after the gigabit switch is power cycled- meaning they work one day, and they don't the other.
3. You can probably tell by my last two notes that I'm not a huge fan of this setup.

Helpful Links

Here's a few helpful links for more information before you get started.  The first is from Yamaha and contains a few user and setup guides. You'll need to click on the tab titled "self-training." Read through these a few times. They're pretty helpful.

Yamaha / Dante MY 16-AUD Dante Network Cards

You're also going to want to make sure you have the latest software  and firmware updates:

Firmware, Software & Drivers

And you'll need a gigabit switch. As far as I know the Dante networks are a little particular about what hardware you use. There are some guides in the links below to choosing a switch.

Gigabit Switches For CL Series Consoles 

Selecting Network Switches

Getting Started

Installing the Dante cards is covered on page 12 of the current guide, available from the first link above. You'll need to do that, but in short they pretty much just plug into the back of the console.

So, once the cards are installed you'll need to decide what your clock source is. There is a lot of detail about that on pages 28-33 of the Dante-MY16-AUD User Guide.

Then you'll need to configure your direct outs. To do that you'll go to the patch editor on the console. Select the Direct Out patch tab. Then set Input Chanel 1 to Slot 1 Output 1. Set Input Channel 2 to Slot 1 Output 2, and so on.  When you get to Input 17, just set it to Slot 2 Output 1. In short Channels 1-16 Direct Outs get routed through Slot 1 Outs 1-16. 17 -32 get routed to Slot 2 Outs 1-16.

Last Step- this is really important.  SAVE YOUR SCENE. You may also want to consider "safe-ing" your patching. This prevents the output patching from being altered with scene recalls. For all the technical stuff you can stop reading here.

An Apology for the Delay

Now I need to apologize for taking so long to write this part of the series! I think it was October 2013 since my last post. I have to be honest- after I started I got rather bored with it. Having to work out all the computer details and things like that isn't that fun. I'd rather be mixing. Setting up a Dante network can be a bit involved, and sometimes the Dante cards on-board the consoles just don't want to act quite right.  That being said- Yamaha/Audinate have released several updates since I started writing this series that address quite a few problems. It's also noteworthy that the newer Yamaha hardware that are running Dante natively such as the new CL series consoles (CL1,3,5 etc) seem to work extremely well, as far as I know.

Coming Up...

I just wanted to take a moment and throw out a quick teaser of what's coming up.

Before I continue with "Programming Inexpensive Controllers", I'm going to revisit the  "Illuminating DMX" series. I want to take some time to go over DMX protocol charts, which are found in the manuals of most lighting instruments. In short these charts explain what parameters of the instrument are controlled by what DMX channel. I feel like it's important to understand this, so that you can develop a strategy for addressing your instruments, as well as programming scenes.

I would also like to take a trip through audio world for a little while.  Some of this will probably sound like a foreign language to some of you, but that's ok.  I'll try to unpack this stuff in depth sometime.  I recently had a customer purchase two Dante-MY-16-AUD digital network cards. These cards allow the user to take 16 channels of audio, bi-directionally into and out of a console via Gigabit Ethernet. They were installed into a Yamaha LS9 digital audio console. The goal was to take 32 direct outs from the console at front of house, and feed a computer in a broadcast room in another part of the church, then record that using Pro Tools 10. I'll take some time to explain how we had to patch the direct outs in the console, set up the Dante Virtual Soundcard on the computer, and build an aggregate audio device in Pro Tools so we could have local monitoring in the broadcast room.

~Andy