[PD] Sending audio over the network

[Spencer Russell]

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday and today looking at how to get audio
between machines on a network in PD, so I wanted to share what I found in
the hopes that it saves someone else some time.

For reference i'm on OSX 10.9.4, using PD-extended 0.43.4

There are several objects that claim to be able to do this. It wasn't clear
to me which (if any) of them are maintained, and most of them don't seem to
be currently working on my system.

*udpsend~ / udpreceive~*
I didn't at first think they were installed in my PD-extended install
because I needed to add an [import mrpeach]. After doing all this looking
around though it seems like this is the best and most supported option
right now. I was hoping to be able to use one of the compressed options
(mp3 or ogg) because latency isn't a huge deal for my application and I
don't want to have to worry too much about bandwidth when running multiple
channels (I need 5). Apparently these are the next generation of netsend~ /
netreceive~.

*netsend~ / netreceive~*
These seem to be newer (and derived from) the streamin~/streamout~ and
streamin13~/streamout13 objects. They don't come with pd-extended but there
are binaries (and source) available at
http://www.nullmedium.de/dev/netsend~/. Unfortunately the OSX binaries are
PPC and in a .sit archive, which belies their age. Building also required a
couple tweaks to the makefile. Seemed to work well within my local machine,
but I didn't get around to trying it across machines.

*streamout~ / streamin~*
These seemed to work pretty well to send data, but when DSP is on the
streamin~ patch window was totally frozen and unresponsive.

*streamout13~ / streamin13~*
PD crashed when I tried to instantiate a [streamout13~] object.

*mp3streamout~ / mp3streamin~*
PD crashes if DSP is on while [mp3streamin~] is connected. Incidentally the
backtrace indicates that the receiving side is segfaulting in liblame
trying to decode the header:
  * frame #0: 0x080cf660 libmp3lame.0.dylib`decode_header + 304
    frame #1: 0x081fbeea mp3streamin~.pd_darwin`mp3streamin_recv + 242

*ogglive~*
This doesn't seem to be supported for a long while. I tracked down the
source and built it, but couldn't get it to work. After sending the connect
message to one of the [ogglive~] instances to connect it to the other, the
server object still reported no clients connected. It also often crashed PD
when deleting one of the instances.

*pd-iemrtp*
I didn't get around to trying this one. It seems more recent than the
others but is also more complex to use


peace,
s
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