[PD] wireless audio from Pd to PA system

katja katjavetter at gmail.com
Thu Feb 28 11:53:43 CET 2013


For a wearable live performance computer, I am looking into the
options of sending wireless audio from Pd to a PA sound system and
other listeners.

In a first experiment I've tried a Linex FM transmitter. Audio quality
is good enough, and FM transmitters do not introduce latency. This
option is cheap and flexible, as the signal can be received by simple
radio's, which are even built into cell phones and media players. I
would need to boost the transmission a bit to make it more reliable.
This will of course make the equipment illegal. Even then, the risk
that someone else is transmitting a stronger signal on the channel can
not be excluded.

Another option could be to send audio over Wifi. This would require
WLAN to be available, and one extra computer (with audio interface) as
a receiver. To avoid extra latency the audio should be sent
uncompressed, like [udpsend~] / [udpreceive~] can do it. This has the
risk of packet loss and serious dropouts.

I've been searching for 2.4 GHz wireless music receivers and found
things like this:
http://www.sitecom.com/en/wireless-music-streamer/wl-061/p/203. They
seem to act like external soundcards for your computer. In Linux
though I've never managed to properly connect multiple soundcards with
Pd (in OSX it's easy using the Aggregate Device Editor from Audio MIDI
Setup). Also I guess these devices introduce huge latency. With audio
over bluetooth headsets I've experienced latencies up to a second.

Does anyone use a satisfactory method in practice, to send audio from
Pd without wires?

Thanks,
Katja



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