One of the most interesting technologies at the recent Audio Engineering Society show wasn't accompanied by pulsing LEDs or Bavarian vacuum tubes. In a simple booth, CEntrance was showing its Universal Driver (UD), a $79 piece of software that enhances FireWire audio and MIDI on Windows.
In addition to low latency (reportedly 5ms roundtrip), UD supports device aggregation, which lets Windows users combine multiple FireWire audio interfaces into a single logical unit. (Mac users got this capability in OS 10.4 Tiger.) At the booth, CEntrance Managing Director Michael Goodman fed the 24 outputs of an Alesis ADAT HD24 hard-disk recorder into Mackie 12- and 16-channel mixers, then routed the mixers' FireWire outputs into Steinberg Cubase.
In other words, the UD software combined two FireWire audio interfaces into one. For anyone who dislikes throwing away old gear simply because they need more I/O, this is a welcome step forward. I've mentioned UD before; it's good to see that the number of supported devices and formats continues to increase.
Categories
Audio
Comments (2)
Read More Entries by David Battino.
Bill: I'm currently using Soundflower (www.cycling74.com) for interapplication audio routing. I can switch it on the fly (even during recording) with the system-wide SoundSource menu (www.rogueamoeba.com). Jack looks much more complicated, and you apparently have to launch it before launching your other apps. What's the advantage?
hey
why throw away good equipment when you can throw away that evil windows machine?
buy the mac...
and use Jack Router for routing all the machinery...
its FREE
Jack (the Jack Audio Connection Kit) is a low-latency audio server, written originally for the GNU/Linux operating system, and now with Mac OS X support.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16162