The wonderful world of digital audio

I've always been fascinated by digital audio. How is it that hundreds of channels of extremely high quality audio can be shuffled around a stadium in near real-time, processed, mixed, and broadcast? I've made a few attempts at playing with networked audio, none very successful. There seems to be a new protocol every time I look, from all sorts of groups and manufacturers.

Hex recently invested in Behringer's X32 line of consoles, along with their S16 and S32 stageboxes. This system uses the proprietary AES50 protocol between stageboxes and consoles, which seems to do the trick for us. What's really good about the X32 though is it's XCtrl protocol. A protocol that runs over standard ethernet, and is able to broadcast the state of a console to anyone who wants to listen. Another Behringer product that leverages that protocol is the X-Touch, which speaks both MIDI and XCtrl. It's this X-Touch, alongside XCtrl, that I've been playing with recently.

There's a very fun piece of software called VoiceMeeter that is pretty much what happens if you give steroids to a computer's native sound mixer. It can handle 8 ins, 8 outs, and a whole bunch of effects, dynamics and interesting bits along the way. The major perk of this for me though is the VBAN protocol. Real-time, low latency, networked audio, available on any machine. VBAN acts as a virtual mixer, streaming in from multiple sources and keeping an eye on what's going on. It can also interface with standard MIDI controllers, so the X-Touch worked right off the bat to control the software with actual hardware. But one of the biggest perks of the X-Touch is its 'scribble strips', little OLED displays above each channel that would usually display the name of the channel or some other details. These aren't part of the MIDI standard, so just sit there looking pretty all the time. They come to life when poked with XCtrl though, so there must be a way to make them do something.

This is where it all comes together. VBAN has a sub-protocol that broadcasts the state of its own system as often as you request it, and another that acts as virtual MIDI. XCtrl is basically MIDI wrapped with a load of sparkles, so isn't too bad to talk to. I'm working on a network-based middle man between VoiceMeeter and an X-Touch that gives you back the scribble strips and channel meters, but also still allows MIDI control of the application. That's the idea anyway!