Re: [Jack-Devel] Sending audio data over the network help

On Wed, April 9, 2014 5:30 pm, Jared Swets wrote:
> Here is what I am trying to do:  I want to play video games on one PC,
> and record both my MIC and Headphones from PC 1 on PC 2. I want to do
> this using as little system resources as possible on PC 1.

That should be possible, but you will need to verify by using the setup
you intend to use, i.e. recording software on the second PC, not another
sound hardware device.

The software will need to use the ASIO interface to connect to JACK,
including the video game, which will probably be the sticking point.

http://jackaudio.org/jack_on_windows

If by some lucky coincidence your game supports ASIO (extremely unlikely),
then you would start JACK specifying the correct audio hardware in the
process, start JACK on the slave machine, start the game and audio
recording software (ASIO was created for use with recording software, so
finding recording software which supports ASIO should not pose a problem),
and use the jack router to connect the game to the audio hardware outputs
and microphone, and also connect the microphone and game audio output to
the recording software running on the slave computer.

> I set up the jack server on PC 1, and patched it back on itself, and
> heard myself (loopback successful), so attempted to do the same thing
> using netjack over the network.  I thought since the loopback worked
> on PC 1 I could write directly to the audio devices on PC 2.
> Apparently not though.

Not directly.  However if instead of the audio devices on PC2 you start an
ASIO compatible recording software, use jack router on PC2 to connect the
software to JACK, then you should be able to connect the audio hardware
connections on PC1  to the recording software on PC2.

The problem will probably come when you try to also connect the game audio
connections to JACK on PC1.  I have never seen a game which supports ASIO,
although I'm not a gamer so I haven't really paid close attention.

> I didn't want to use a full teleconferencing software (if one exists)
> to do this since I suspected the overhead would be much higher

Not only that, the situation is different than what you originally
described (connecting microphone and outputs between two computers), what
you really want is parallel connection, the audio hardware on one computer
should go to two places, the game and the second computer.  I don't know
of audio conferencing software can do that or not.  Not a typical use
case.

If you were on Linux or OS X JACK would probably be OK for what you want,
it is just a little complicated because typical software uses the WDM API
for audio, but recording software typically uses the ASIO API so you have
a mismatch when trying to mix recording software and other software.

-- 
Chris Caudle

1397159599.15907_0.ltw:2, <64a90399f72fc4374c5d0dd05fd0c444.squirrel at email dot powweb dot com>