Multi channel audio installation with Sonobus

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Ben Neill

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Mar 23, 2022, 11:10:50 AM3/23/22
to SonoBus Users
I am looking to use Sonobus for an outdoor installation/performance with battery operated speakers positioned around a pond. Each speaker will be paired with a laptop or iPad running Sonobus to receive the audio that I send from my computer. The transmission will only be one way. My question is, could I assign different outputs from my audio interface/Ableton setup to the individual speakers that are attached to Sonobus, essentially creating a surround system? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Yonatan Mijelshon

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Mar 23, 2022, 2:25:00 PM3/23/22
to Ben Neill, SonoBus Users
To simplify the setup, you should use multiple instances of SonoBus as a plugin, each one in a separate channel, then use some clever routing within your DAW to distribute each part of the package to its destination. You would connect each laptop speaker only to its designated group, in a one-to-one fashion, while your main computer acts as a hub. 

The other, worse option would be to have one big session where every computer is connected and can hear all the channels, but set the main PC in Multichannel mode. Then, each laptop would go into the multi - receive layout and mute every received channel but it's chosen one. For that to work, you would need to first work setting the SonoBus plugin as a multi channel entity, routing various sources into its channel in a specific, channel by channel fashion, then work within the Input Mixer in SonoBus to assign every incoming channel to a different internal channel (making sure each one is Mono) 

I think this can be worse network performance wise because as of yet, that I know of, when you mute an incoming channel from within a Multichannel transmission SonoBus is still using the full bandwidth, just muting the sound. If that were to change, this would probably be the best, stabler way.... I think your bottleneck is the WiFi saturation and not the CPU/bandwidth on your main computer 

On Wed, 23 Mar 2022 at 12:10 Ben Neill <benn...@gmail.com> wrote:
I am looking to use Sonobus for an outdoor installation/performance with battery operated speakers positioned around a pond. Each speaker will be paired with a laptop or iPad running Sonobus to receive the audio that I send from my computer. The transmission will only be one way. My question is, could I assign different outputs from my audio interface/Ableton setup to the individual speakers that are attached to Sonobus, essentially creating a surround system? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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Jesse Chappell

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Mar 23, 2022, 2:39:07 PM3/23/22
to Yonatan Mijelshon, Ben Neill, SonoBus Users
Yonatan has explained it very well. Although the second way using multichannel sending from a single source instance is simpler to set up, it will use a lot more bandwidth because all the channels will be sent to all destinations, even if they are muted remotely.

Jesse

Michael Dessen

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Mar 24, 2022, 3:38:05 PM3/24/22
to SonoBus Users
Thanks Yonatan and Jesse for pointing out that clever first idea! Jacktrip could also be great for this since you could easily route individual channels from the server to each client, but it isn't an option since Ben says he's using iPads as well as computers. As long as the main computer can manage it, that first suggestion is a really great workaround to essentially mimic a client-server setup despite Sonobus being p2p. 

If ultra-low latency isn't an issue, I would suggest also considering Audiomovers Listento plugin for streaming high quality audio to a URL/browser, which could be even simpler (i.e. put the plugin on each channel). But I think it only gets you down to about 100ms latency last I checked, so it won't work if you need really tight timing.

I continue to use Sonobus for all kinds of things and it's an amazing tool. Thank you again, Jesse!

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