Anyone have a solution to MacOS external clocking to AVB Milan standards?

[Rob Scott]

Hello, QLab friends.

This isn't directly a QLab question, but it is certainly QLab adjacent. My apologies for posting here if it's not appropriate. I know that there are people here who are smarter and more experienced than I am in this area.

Our local theater usually uses QLab on a Mac Studio or a Mac Mini that is USB-connected to a Presonus 32s or 64s audio mixing console depending on the specific performance space . We have a desire to be able to connect the Mac(s) to one of these audio consoles over the network using an AVB driver/virtual device that gets installed on the Mac when the Presonus (Now Fender Presonus) Universal Control program is installed. 

When connecting the Mac to the Presonus console in this way, we end up with clocking issues and audio dropouts every 10-15 seconds. We have determined that this is because the Mac should be a clocking client of the Presonus console, but that choice is not available to us in the AVB virtual device settings and the Mac uses its own clock. The audio consoles are at the latest firmware version which supports the Milan AVB standard. Apparently either the MacOS IEEE AVB capabilities and/or the Universal Control virtual device capabilities do not yet support the IEEE Milan AVB standard that would allow MacOS to take clocking from the audio console. 

It's very likely that this is a Presonus-specific issue because the virtual AVB device feature of Universal Control doesn't appear to have been updated since 2023. In case you're wondering: yes, we do have the latest version of UC installed on the Mac and the latest firmware on the Presonus consoles.

Have any of you encountered this particular issue on MacOS using AVB? If so, have you found a workaround? It's possible that there are independent AVB virtual device interfaces for MacOS that are Milan AVB compliant, but I have yet to find one using our friend Da Google. 

I know that Dante doesn't have this issue because their virtual interface does have the ability to select a remote device as the clocking source.

Thank you for any feedback about this issue. This group is an incredible font of wisdom.

Wth gratitude,

Rob

[Rich Walsh]

I’m intrigued by this as I thought AVB support was built into the macOS? Without any other AVB devices to hand it’s not been possible to test that though…

This page has a big chunk about clocking, but I don’t know if it’s relevant: https://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/articles/38925260615437-How-to-connect-your-Series-III-console-running-firmware-v3-1-to-a-Mac-over-AVB.

Rich