MAST: multicast audio streaming toolkit

[Nicholas Humfrey]

Hi,

While I was a student, I was working on a project called MAST: multicast audio streaming toolkit.

The focus was on streaming audio over the Multicast Internet (which I had access to at the University of Southampton). But I was never happy with the state of MAST, mainly because of a dependency upon the oRTP library. One of the main problems at the time was that oRTP had various exceptions of a 8000Hz sample rate, because the main use-case was VoIP.

This year I started working on MASTv2, which instead has a focus on low latency audio on a Local Area Network (AES67). MASTv1 only supported static RTP payload types, whereas MASTv2 supports dynamic payloads types using SDP. It no longer has a dependency on oRTP and the license has been changed to MIT.

The tools I have created so far are:

* mast-info - Show information / parameters about a stream

* mast-sap-client - Search for available audio sessions on the local network (discovery)

* mast-sap-server - Advertise the existence of a stream on the local network

* mast-record - Record a stream to a audio file to disk

* mast-meter - Calculate and display audio levels (in dB) of a stream

There is a video of mast-meter working in the console here:

https://twitter.com/njh/status/1148685994721460224

I have not done a point-release yet but the source code is on GitHub here:

https://github.com/njh/mast

Next steps:

In order to make the collection of tools easier to use, I am planning on building a node.js based Web GUI. This will make stream discovery easier and provide process management to start and stop the tools.

I have also just started learning the Rust programming language and I am very interested in re-writing MAST (again?!) in Rust.

nick.