Starlink Satellite Streaming

[James North]

Hi Folks,

First of all - congrats to Jesse on such a great piece of software.  It does what others try do and fail - all in a really elegant and powerful manner.

I'm a music producer who has decided to go remote and I'm looking for a streaming service for clients to patch into.  I have a Starlink Satellite connection (usually 150Mb down, 15Mb up - image attached) and no matter what settings I use, anything outside my network sounds glitchy with that underwater lossy audio streaming thing.  The jitter buffer text goes red and it jumps around showing dropped and resent packets.

I have the send and receive buffers manually set at 500ms and also I've tried 1000ms as well.  I'm only sending 2 channels of 128kbps audio - ultimately I've love to send it multichannel as then clients could get the ability to mix things like my talkback and live instruments etc).

Is there something inherently awful about satellite internet that makes this kind of thing near impossible when going peer-to-peer?

I've seen some requests/talk of a server or relay thing being an add-on of some sort - I have an Ubuntu box in a good local data centre (for my websites) that would work for me if anything like that ever got released but I'm not sure whether that would help or not.

Any insight would be appreciated!

Thanks so much

James

[Bruce Hayward]

For SonoBus or Source-Connect or other similar peer-to-peer networks, it's always recommended to have a wired ethernet connection and port: open. That said SonoBus will work with Wi-Fi and without port: open. Counter-intuitively, SonoBus works with less latency the less compressed codec you use. Instead of MP3 quality 128 kpbs, try 16/44.1 or 16/48 PCM.

[Jesse Chappell]

James,

It is interesting that even with the huge jitter buffer sizes that you still experience a lot of dropouts. Obviously, satellite internet is going to have particular issues, but those stats are actually a lot better than I would have expected.

Of course, connecting to your home network router via ethernet is always the first thing to make sure you do, just to eliminate that variable. I would actually be curious to hear some recorded audio from a connection on your end, and I'd even be interested in doing a live test with you for troubleshooting. Email me off-list to set that up if you are interested.

Jesse

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[Mike O'Connor]

hi James,

really cool that you're trying to use Starlink!  

for purposes of this discussion, we need to make a distinction between Starlink and all the other satellite providers.  the answer to your question for most satellite provides (Hughs, Dish, etc) is an emphatic "yes, satellite is inherently horrible!" because those birds are all geosynchronous (they stay in a fixed position relative to the earth by orbiting very high - about 22,000 miles/36,000 kilometers).  they'd be horrible no matter what because you'd have gigantic latency as the packets make that huge round trip up and back.  

but Starlink is a different critter and i've been wondering how well it would work.  it's a constellation of satellites that orbits much lower (about 350 miles high) so the latency still won't be great but might be worth a try.  but the other difference with Starlink is that it's constantly changing the path by which packets travel as the satellites move in relation to each other.  here's a video that includes fantastic animations to illustrate this.

my guess would be that all those changes in packet-paths are inducing a lot of jitter.  that said, it would be worth doing some experimenting.  maybe a few of us could jump on a session with you and see what we could figure out to offset that?

mike

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[James North]

Thanks heaps for the replies guys!

I'm in a semi-rural area of Australia just outside Brisbane at the moment so Starlink was the only viable option for sending and receiving large files to clients!  The local ISP solution offered single digits down and barely 1mbit up so it got ditched quickly.

Even with the 6 multichannel stream I'd ultimately like to send it totals around 1Mbit upload ... which is way less than my connection can handle.  I'm able to upload files quickly generally.

Actually I neglected to mention that yes, I have tested the setup with an ethernet cable from my Mac Studio to the router and the exact same thing happens.  The computer generally does use WiFi and I'm not looking for the lowest possible latency - just a stable connection.

Some testing sounds amazing if possible - from what I know about internet connectivity and audio bitrate stuff it certainly seems super odd to me that even with a full second of send and receive latency it's still sounding so poor.

Thanks again and I'll report back!

[AndyMc Producer]

I'd definitely select a raw audio format and not none of the compressed but also the smallest raw sonobus allows. The raw even though more mbps is uncompressed and your internet line with have some compression built in so it's not being compressed again. Using the plugin version of sonobus 

might be more direct but if you can run sonobus along side and hardwire back in via adat or spdif to another device then this could give more stable results to.

On top of that possibly adjust the MTU ands having a look for your os version and operating system tweaks. 

Even the slot your pci-e cards are in can make a difference, so using an adjacent 4x pci-e to your graphics cards 16x pci can split the lanes used by the cards into to, giving less to one you want full lanes used.

USB controllers uses lanes too so consider using hubs on one usb port rather than filling every port in the back of your machine. Like keyboard, mouse, webcam could sit on one port and usb a separate port exclusive for any usb audio devices and affordable usb3 is starting to pop up now.

It might be you try all that and still have the issues but it could be better. IF  you get all the rest right then when it comes to your internet, if your still getting issues then slowing it down a touch or trying to buffer (which does create latency) to smoothen the transition from computer to internet.

A bit like how you increase buffers on an audio interface, it stops all the clicks and pops but at the gain of latency but reason it stops the click and pops is the computer has more time to handle the audio hence the delay when upping buffers.

I use 2 interfaces here and sometimes use 2 with sonobus but I have a few studio setups here so some allow for loopback at a low latency but on the machines not as powerful i use 2 audio interfaces which sometimes can yield a better result.

[T.W. Day]

I'm a retired engineer and am using Sonobus solely for recreational purposes. I do make recordings with the output I get from the sessions I have with 3-4 friends spread across the country from Santa Fe, NM to Columbus, GA to upstate New York (I'm in rural Minnesota, but on a decent fiber optic line). We usually "work" on a song for several weeks before we start recording for "real" and that gives me lots of comps to work with to get around those "glitchy" moments. That does mean that, instead of looking for the best performance moments, I'm often looking for the best sounding moments. Still, Sonobus has less of those problems, along with irregular latency, than any other platform I've used (including the ones that charge a substantial monthly fee). The advice to go to a raw format is worthwhile, for sure. We settled on 48k/16bit WAV for several reasons, but that did solve more than a couple problems early on with Sonobus.

We're all over the place on OS platforms, too. I'm either on a 5,1 Mac Pro stuck to High Sierra or a Win11 laptop and everyone else in our group is either on a slightly newer system or state-of-Apple's-art OS systems, but on a laptop.

[James North]

Thanks heaps Andy - I might give the 16bit PCM a go, but I'm pretty sure I've tried that at some point too.

Yep I've got buffers at 500ms (have also tried 1000ms) for send and receive!

I've got a Mac Studio so no pcie slots - but I'm using the standalone app with inputs selected from my UAD Apollo thunderbolt interfaces and using the 'virtual channels' in their Console app to send the data.  Kinda like a loopback I guess.

I don't think the computer/graphics/audio interfaces are the issues in my case but I could try a different interface - I have a few USB and other thunderbolt ones lying around.

https://jamesnorth.productions

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[James North]

Good stuff - that's great to hear ... thanks TW Day!  I will definitely give 16bit PCM a go.  I think 4Mbits up should be possible on my connection.

Yeah I'm hoping to do some remote recording at some point (the monitor delay thing in Sonobus on my end is fantastic and lets me hear the performance in accurate time).  A while ago I used Steinberg's VST Connect Pro and it worked really well (including delaying the monitor to the roundtrip latency total dynamically).  I just love the thought and design of Sonobus and I'm sure it can work if I'm able to solve some of these issues.

I tried a few of the paid solutions actually and had good results with one or two of them - but they use relay servers ... I kind of hoped peer to peer would be even better but so far it's been oddly poor.

Will keep digging!

I really appreciate everyone's assistance and willingness to help.