13 ms·

Ask HN: Why isn't there a standard network audio protocol?

• rapjr9 4y ago
  If you are just looking to move audio from one computer to another you can do it with netcat, no protocol needed: https://www.audio-digital.net/a-pages/audio-over-netcat.html https://www.audio-digital.net/a-pages/audio-over-netcat.html I've tried this and it works.
  • nickysielicki 4y ago
    Pulseaudio can do this itself. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Network/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documen...
    • rapjr9 4y ago
      Yes, but PulseAudio requires loading a module, authentication, and configuration of several files. It's more versatile I'm sure but if you just want something that works quickly, using netcat to forward from /dev/dsp seems simpler on your own network not connected to the internet. Using netcat has no fault tolerance, a temporary disconnection is likely to cause it to fail, but it's an easy way to get something working quickly, and for some people that might be good enough. Netcat may run on more platforms than PulseAudio does also, especially small embedded systems.
• stuntkite 4y ago
  This is a great question that I've been playing with since getting some JBL PA speakers and seeing the ethernet jacks and looking at what it supported. It's SO difficult to get something working without buying really locked down and expensive gear that is for much larger applications. Also pretty cumbersome to enable on my Ubiquiti router but I'm getting there! I ended up settling on using CobraNET by buying some fairly affordable GPIO rack units from reverb from a defunct church made by AudioScience. As doesn't really want to sell to me directly but they sell to a lot of churches and they scale up and down a lot so nice gear is really affordable. I wouldn't call it easy to use, but compatible, affordable, and pretty cool. I've been working on a 4.2 mini "ambisonic" setup... It's a long term goal like an old guys basement train set. Heh. http://www.audioscience.com/internet/products/cobranet/cobranet.htm http://www.audioscience.com/internet/products/cobranet/cobra... I hope this helps and thanks for bringing this up to HN. I look forward to reading all the replies.
• LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  But there is! https://radscan.com/nas.html https://radscan.com/nas.html
  • kjs3 4y ago
    Ha! Came to post this...I assumed I was the only one to remember it. I got it working when it was part of NCDWare for the NCD X terminals (mostly on the later 700-series terms). Worked, though the audio hardware on the terminals was basic, so it wasn't exactly an audiophile experience. Very clever work, tho.
    • LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
      I remember it from the times where you had ESD (enlightenment sound demon) running on Linux, and this in addition. At least that was the default on some Redhat systems, IIRC?
• rglullis 4y ago
  RTSP/RTMP are not to your liking?
• craggyjaggy 4y ago
  If you want to turn your home into a TV/Radio station, have a look at Audio Video Bridging[1]. It requires special hardware, but once you're set up devices can reserve bandwidth for their streams which will be prioritized by switches over other Ethernet traffic thus ensuring 100% reliability and sub-2ms latency accross 7 hops. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging
• duped 4y ago
  There is, it's called AES67. It just isn't used much in consumer products. The acronym to google is AoIP ("audio over IP")
• b20000 4y ago
  there is already ABV and DANTE in the pro audio world. you are not aware of it because you probably are not in the recording/audio/music business. bluetooth sucks because it was invented by a bunch of guys in suits and consumer electronics companies rather than people who understand latency, performance etc. i designed my own protocol in the 2.4ghz band and wrote firmware and middleware for it and it deals with all the weaknesses of BT. BT should have been designed by those who design the products and applications and deal first hand with end users.
  • cogman10 4y ago
    BT was designed to be a general purpose peer to peer wireless communication protocol. It was not designed to solely carry audio. It just sort of morphed into being primarily used as an audio exchange format (because it's "good enough"). A little bit like how USB morphed into a peripheral bus even though it was designed to be more all encompassing (USB Ethernet, for example). In fact, the USB protocol is somewhat mucked up by the fact that it was designed to be a network instead of a more direct connection.
    • KptMarchewa 4y ago
      Now it's actually used in this way with USB4/Thunderbolt 4.
    • b20000 4y ago
      yes, general purpose, another expression for mediocre or garbage. i think BT wwas first designed for exchanging photos. so mass storage transfer. it should have been designed for streaming latency sensitive data like audio first, and then the “easier” scenarios could have been built on top of that. at least with USB there was the common sense to include ISO transfers although drivers for that in OSes happened relatively late and OS vendors have ignored the standard for many years, requiring the purchase of analyzers. in that regard there is similarity with BT but with USB it seems easier to come up with a solution as a firmware/driver/application developer. at least in my experience.
  • MisterTea 4y ago
• open-paren 4y ago
  In this thread: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  • csours 4y ago
    At work: why do we have 9 different ways to identify a physical location? Because there are 5 different teams that need to do that, and our team hasn't gotten around to re-inventing the wheel like the other teams have.
    • jrmg 4y ago
      It looks like it’s still under active development (on SourceForge!) https://sourceforge.net/p/nas/activity/?page=0&limit=100#61f5c1cb1c413923a7ca1ec2 https://sourceforge.net/p/nas/activity/?page=0&limit=100#61f...
• jszymborski 4y ago
  It's a bit funny that there are already a bunch of comments that are stating "There already is, it's called 'X'", each with a different value for X. I think this paints a better picture of the situation than any one person can provide.
  • averagedev 4y ago
    Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  • hedora 4y ago
    In true HN fashion, first-mover / market-leader Sonos isn't even mentioned yet. The reason there isn't a standard (other than Sonos, or those discontinued Chromecast dongles) is that you need the following to work seamlessly: - network attached DAC of some sort (in-speaker, or not; don't care) - iOS app - Android app - the top 10 streaming services - radio streaming directories, like TuneIn, or the open source ones. - airplay - Chromecast - network / device auto discovery - sound synchronization - power management - desktop apps - NFS/cifs/etc bridge - hdmi/fiber/??? bridge - N.M surround sound (for N = 2, 3,5,7,9 and M=0,1,2) - Some battery powered, waterproof speaker that works in direct sunlight on hot days - Hardware distribution at places like IKEA, BestBuy, Amazon, etc. - A healthy used hardware market - 10+ year support lifetimes on the speakers + amps (note: discrete, cheap DAC dongles could disrupt sonos on this point) And other things I forgot about.
    • darrenf 4y ago
      > In true HN fashion, first-mover / market-leader Sonos isn't even mentioned yet. I bought my first Sonos device last year, the Roam. Using it as a bluetooth speaker is fine and I love the sound and portability, but oh boy do I hate the experience of trying to use Sonos services over wifi. Nine times out of ten, perhaps even more often, the iOS app says it can't connect and "let's fix it". If I go through the slow reconnection wizard it invariably ends up telling me to reboot my router(!?). I learned to either switch the Roam on/off a bunch of times, or kill and restart the app a bunch of times, before the app eventually decides yes, it can find the device ... only to then fail again when half hour later I want to add something else to the queue or switch station.
• geekuillaume 4y ago
  There are some projects like Snapcast[1] or SoundSync[2] (disclaimer: I'm the creator of Soundsync) to let multiple devices communicate together on the same network. The transmission-side isn't that complex: you choose an audio codec, transmit chunks of data and add a synchronization layer (to keep multiple outputs in sync and to correctly delay video playback to match the soundtrack). The bigger problem is building an ecosystem big enough to make it attractive. Bluetooth sucks but is everywhere. [1] https://github.com/badaix/snapcast https://github.com/badaix/snapcast [2] https://github.com/geekuillaume/soundsync https://github.com/geekuillaume/soundsync
  • armagon 4y ago
    Ooh, SoundSync sounds awesome (no pun intended).
  • ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    That looks really neat, I'm not this far in my home automation system dreams (yet), but as I get closer to settling on how I will communicate back and forth to each room, I may need to take a closer look here.
  • jbverschoor 4y ago
    Multi output audio is one thing, but for me, something similar to spotify connect (having one master player, either elected or dedicated, and the others are remote controls for it, is more important). I'm boycotting spotify, so I'm looking for something for soundcloud, deezer, or youtube music. Tbh, skip deezer, as they actively refuse to create something similar to spotify connect. IMO this is the USP of sonos.. it acts as spotify connect for all services
  • mrandish 4y ago
    I hadn't seen SoundSync before. It looks neat. Like a lot of other people doing (or trying to do) Whole Home Audio, I'm using the Home Assistant open source platform as the central automation controller. You may want to look at creating a Home Assistant integration for SoundSync as it will expose it to the massive HA community (https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/development_index/ https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/development_index/).
• bentcorner 4y ago
  To pile on further, you may have better success getting a small device (like a pi) and connect the audio out to your speaker.
  • armagon 4y ago
    I'm using Amazon Alexa Echo Dots. I really wish they had a line-in connection, as it, too, would make life much easier when I want to play audio from a device.
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > I'm wondering why there isn't a standard protocol for transmitting audio over the network. Bluetooth isn't the same as your WiFi network. Most of the comments here are talking about IP-based protocols that aren't relevant for Bluetooth anyway. Bluetooth is probably the best example of a widely adopted protocol for connecting to devices and sending audio streams. The protocol isn't exactly the problem. It's the buggy implementations of Bluetooth stacks and Bluetooth software in embedded devices. Getting it right is actually extremely difficult because Bluetooth grew in complexity to be everything to everyone. It isn't only an audio sending protocol. Almost nobody owns the entire Bluetooth stack, so it's a mix of pieces from different companies and vendors. Apple's implementation isn't perfect, but from experience I can tell you it's 10X better than the nightmare that is Android Bluetooth. It's getting better, but for years you had to collect a lot of different Android phones so you could make your software work around all of the different quirks in each vendor's different Bluetooth stacks.
  • Isthatablackgsd 4y ago
    > Apple's implementation isn't perfect, but from experience I can tell you it's 10X better than the nightmare that is Android Bluetooth Seem like I have different experience with them. I don't have issues with Android Bluetooth, I do have issues with Apple bluetooth. Half of the time, my iPad couldn't detect my bluetooth devices (keyboard and audio accessory) are trying to connect to it (already paired). When that occurred, I have to go to the Command Center to force connect my bluetooth devices and half of the time iPad will obligate and connect. Other time it just give up and said couldn't connect or cannot find it (while my bluetooth device is poking iPad to connect). It is a hassle to use my bluetooth devices with the iPad daily. On the Android side, it instantly connects, even my phone is sleeping.
    • lowwave 4y ago
      that is the exact reason I don't like to use bluetooth for audio devices. Nothing beats physical jack cables.
    • RajT88 4y ago
      Seconded. Any bluetooth issues I have on Android are specific to a particular device. The cheap anker headsets I mostly use are rock solid. I have an android head unit (second one actually, first one was garbage) and a Bluetooth radar detector. The detector always works with my phones, and never with my head unit(s).
• akvadrako 4y ago
  There is Airplay 1, which is the only widely supported protocol I'm aware of. See for example https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync. There is also DLNA, which is actually a standard. I think it's rarely supported for push audio streaming since the protocol is poorly specified.
• sigstoat 4y ago
  clearly (given all the other responses), there are a bunch of different conflicting requirements which lead to different protocols. as for your bluetooth issues, PC bluetooth is a mess. some of bluetooth's messiness comes from having the higher level elements of the stack designed 20+ years ago to operate on microcontrollers of that era. they've got N different audio profiles because the hardware it was expected to operate on originally would've been hard pressed to handle a single audio profile that could negotiate the gamut of use cases.
• nikonyrh 4y ago
  Bluetooth has been in development for over 20 years now, I'd assume they have solved all the problems by now. Meanwhile the consumer WIFI is faster than ethernet copper.
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  There is, Dante.
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  Isn't Dante audio this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_(networking) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_(networking)
• aj7 4y ago
  And while we’re on the subject, why is cell phone audio so horrible? It is worse than that delivered by the cast metal telephones with rotating dials of my youth.
  • colordrops 4y ago
    Does your phone not support VoLTE? You might have to explicitly turn it on. Sounds great on my phone.
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    It doesn't need to be. With VoLTE the sound quality is usually pretty crisp in my experience. It all depends on the carrying technology, bandwidth, compression parameters and codecs used. EVS supports up to 128kbps audio streams, which makes voice data come across crystal clear, and that's a technology from 8 years ago. One problem is the fact that the codec needs to be negotiated, and if you're unlucky with codec compatibility, both callers fall back to crappy old codecs. Then there are tons of options for audio profile selection depending on requirements and bandwidth available (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Voice_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Voice_Services for an overview) which makes it difficult to say what cause your specific problems. Without VolTE, you're falling back to 3G audio, probably AMR or AMR-WB, which is quite old and doesn't compress as well as modern standards. Unless you mean the headphone profile for Bluetooth headsets: that's terrible because the standard is ancient, back when Bluetooth had even less capacity for low latency data transfer, and the codec is suboptimal making the situation even worse. There are better codecs out there, and some headsets will support what some call mSBC, which massively improves the audio quality (but not exactly to a HD audio stream because of limitations). There have been several proprietary attempts to fix this issue, but implementing those solutions costs money so many headphones ship without them.
  • kube-system 4y ago
    Analog-only phones had great quality because they didn't sample voice. Once phone systems were changed to digital backbones, it became necessary to sample voices, and the sampling rates that were chosen were done so for efficiency using the tech of the time. Usually 4 khz samples. While there are better quality standards today, many phone systems will fall back on old standards.
• incomingpain 4y ago
  I too found bluetooth to be unreliable. For that reason, I have extensively worked with pulseaudio over network. There is no UI that works for this. NTP for some reason is important which seems like bad design to me. zeroconf doesn't work at all. Once you get it working... dont dare change anything. It will break in inexplicable ways that drive you up a wall.
• throwaway67743 4y ago
  Probably get flamed for this, but pulseaudio is good enough for IP networks and handles delay calculation pretty well, when used via multicast it's reasonable but a lack of ecosystem means non-linux support is poor and control is basically non existent, but I did operate pulseaudio as my home audio for TV/PlayStation/phone audio for a time, with some extras like casting receivers etc it's almost useful, but not convenient (there is a gap here someone could fill)
  • necovek 4y ago
    Yeah, I've used pulseaudio to play same music on multiple computers and their speakers in multiple rooms, and it worked well enough for that: however, that won't solve the issue for the original poster who wants their music to go to a "smart" speaker.
  • loa_in_ 4y ago
    JACKv1 (JACK Audio Connection Kit) has a working audio networking for both Windows and Linux
  • fer 4y ago
    Yeah, Pulseaudio network sinks are useful once everything is properly set up. My media system was a LibreELEC that played movies, and the high end audio system was plugged to it. But I'd rather have that sound when playing some YT video on my laptop: just select media center sink and you have it. It's really a shame there's nothing multiplatform just like that except for, maybe, JACK.
• octoberfranklin 4y ago
  There sort of is, RTP/RTSP, and in fact it's been around since the earliest pre-web days of the Internet. The problem is that it's a protocol with a ton of warts -- having two connections, one UDP and one TCP, has been a massive headache for decades now. But it's not awful enough to get ripped up and redone. The Asterisk VOIP platform had a really awesome protocol called IAX that was basically RTP with the two streams merged into a single UDP connection (and a bare-bones TCP-like reliability layer for the control frames inside of UDP). IAX was never meant for anything other than VOIP, but I wish it had been turned into a wholesale replacement for RTP. If that had happened, it would have been wonderful.
• cratermoon 4y ago
  The answer is DRM. In fact, almost any audio/video standard attempts have to address the elephants in the room: Disney, Warner Media, Universal Music Group, etc, and they all require DRM.
  • armagon 4y ago
    Is there DRM added to bluetooth audio connections?
    • cratermoon 4y ago
      See SCMS-T DRM. But Bluetooth has been around since the 90s.[1] 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth#History
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      From my experience, no. The other comment mentions a standard but I have yet to see it in use anywhere.
      • cratermoon 4y ago
        Generally you don't see it, but then again Bluetooth became available to consumers in the late 90s, shortly before the big push to lock up all multimedia sharing.
• macinjosh 4y ago
  What about HDRadio? A home scale FM broadcast could accomplish this efficiently and cheaply. Each speaker would just need an FM receiver. I guess the downside is that your neighbors could listen to whatever you're listening to but who listens to terrestrial radio in their home that is received OTA anymore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio https://www.amazon.com/Home-FM-Transmitter-Whole-House/dp/B07Z8GX5KH https://www.amazon.com/Home-FM-Transmitter-Whole-House/dp/B0...
  • cf100clunk 4y ago
    iBiquity (now owned by DTS) has never, to the best of my knowledge, open sourced their HDC codec, nor has it been reverse-engineered. To me that's a show-stopper towards any kind of widespread buy-in of HD Radio beyond commercial stations. Also, authorities like the FCC take a dim view of FM broadcasting beyond miniscule power levels as seen in car radio adapters due to the easy potential for intentional or unintentional abuse. For example, a 5 Watt FM transmitter sold on eBay may have you thinking it will yield a small amount of power, but spitballing some numbers: outputting it through an FM band turnstile antenna atop a high building or hill could have an Effective Radiated Power in the 7 or 8 kW range, great enough to cover a small city in a round pattern. Your proposed devices would therefore fall into that very low power range for certification but there would need to be some sort of clear channel hopping required. That's fine in rural areas but quite difficult in large metropolitan areas.
• _trampeltier 4y ago
  You can't even send anything from Apple to non Apple by Bluetooth. Why do you expect audio would work.
  • jachee 4y ago
    I don’t understand what you’re saying here. I listen to my Apple devices on a knock-off add-on Bluetooth for my car with no issues. I’ve sent audio to a vast variety of non-Apple Bluetooth devices. In fact the only Apple-branded BT device I use are my AirPods.
    • _trampeltier 4y ago
      Have you ever tryed to send a file, a a picture or something over Bluetooth from Apple to Android?
      • jachee 4y ago
        Why is sending a file relevant in an audio protocol discussion?
      • no3993x 4y ago
        No not in the last decade. It's probably such a remote use case nowadays that it hasnt got any recent attention, if someone needs to forward me something like a picture or PDF then they typically use email, whatsapp, lineapp, signal, dropbox, gdrive etc... I think it must of been 10 years since I had my phone with bluetooth discover-me on and anyone actually tried to beam me something. Bluetooth, to me nowadays, is just something to connect to my airpods but that's largely invisible so I wouldn't noticed if they changed to something other than bluetooth
• qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Some people might say DLNA, but trust me you want absolutely nothing to do with that disaster of a protocol and tech. I have tried off and on for _15 years_ to use different DLNA tech and every single time it ends in total disappointment and failure.
  • dreen 4y ago
    I've got an external HDD with battery and its own small WiFi, it makes its contents available through DLNA. It works great, I usually connect through VLC or a gaming console.
  • raffraffraff 4y ago
    I'm using DLNA to play music from my laptop it at the moment (pulseaudio sink, opus encoded) to a raspberry pi (gmediastreamer) that uses pulseaudio to upmix to 5.1 and play on a usb soundcard. It works, and the quality is good, but the lag is crap and I had to wrap everything in crappy scripts that would fix everything if it died. It's been in place for a year but I'd love to ditch it.
• nomoreusernames 4y ago
  audio signal is enough. jackd is nice as an option.
• currency 4y ago
  Specifically for computers to smart speakers, I use AirPlay 1, but this works better from Windows with a 3rd-party app than from iOS or MacOS—the 3rd party app is perfectly happy to play to as many endpoints as I like, while Apple will only transmit to one endpoint at a time if it's an AirPlay 1 device. From my Windows 10 PC, TuneBlade AirPlay streaming provides a great experience: I can play stream anything that is playing on the PC to any AirPlay device on my LAN, and all the playback devices will be in perfect audio sync. AirPlay 1 devices on my network include an AppleTV, Apple HomePod Minis, Nexum Airplay receivers attached to powered speakers, and DAPs with Airplay reception. There is a significant buffer delay—about 2 seconds—that messes with video streaming. TuneBlade has the ability to stream video to VLC with synced audio, but doesn't support other video streaming endpoints. There is a bufferless mode with no delay, but it doesn't work well on my network.
• nixpulvis 4y ago
  Another question. Why aren't my bluetooth headphones better at buffering larger amounts of data. I should be able to load a complete song without skipping with interference.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    The protocol doesn’t support that - it’s streaming audio.
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Why wouldn't a streaming audio protocol allow for that?
      • chrisseaton 4y ago
        I don’t know if you understand what ‘streaming’ means? Streaming doesn’t support large buffering… because that’s not streaming. But more broadly, not everything can be in scope. At the time of design having 10 MB and a decompressor in earbuds wasn’t realistic. But blaming your headphones is ignorant - the headphones implement a protocol. They don’t have control over the protocol.
        • orhmeh09 4y ago
          The headphones and earbuds could easily and realistically incorporate a buffer today. How’s that being ignorant?
          • chrisseaton 4y ago
            The protocol doesn’t support that. The headphones can do nothing about that.
            • orhmeh09 4y ago
              Why can’t the headphones buffer the sound for a second? Why would it need protocol support? I’m thinking something like anti-disk-skipping on portable CD players.
• winkeltripel 4y ago
  There is. You build a network of analog cables. Use a sound board to 'switch' the channels. This leads to headphones on 3.5mm jacks, and one or more zones of stereos connected by RCA. This 'network' is as solid in 2022 as it was in 1975.
  • lowwave 4y ago
    thank someone brought this up. Wire is always better than wireless. Wish the world would go back to everything being wired, more secure as well.
• exabrial 4y ago
  There is several standards in the professional space, Dante being the biggest for "audio over ethernet". It's packet switched, so buffering is required. AES50 works over cat5 cables, but doesn't use ethernet; it uses a synchronous clock to transmit PCM audio. A lot of the Midas/X32 product lineup uses this to great effect. Dante allows normal IP equipment to function as audio distribution devices, but has noticeable latency for close-quarters stuff (sound travels ~ .9ms / foot +-10%). AES50 has extraordinarily low latency, pretty much as good as analog, but only allows point-to-point links. On the consumer side, RAOP existed for awhile before silicon valley elitism infected Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Audio_Output_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Audio_Output_Protocol EDIT ==== I had in my head the RAOP was an open standard, it's not.
  • nickysielicki 4y ago
    Dante now has an OCI runtime that can do this purely in software without an ultimo, ala Dante Virtual Soundcard on the Windows side, which is a good example of how the embedded space is adapting to this prolonged part shortage. https://www.audinate.com/products/manufacturer-products/dante-embedded-platform https://www.audinate.com/products/manufacturer-products/dant...
  • xxpor 4y ago
    Regular ethernet can do much better than .9 ms / ft, but it would indeed require some buffer size tuning to a level most consumer routers/switches wouldn't allow. Or even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-through_switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-through_switching
    • exabrial 4y ago
      The real problem with Dante is the buffering required, the wire speed is more than sufficient. Ethernet Packets are "best effort", making latency less predictable. Let's say your original source could be heard by the audience. The audio can travel from source, to mic, be digitized, transmitted over IP, arrive at console, be digitally mixed, then transmitted over IP to speaker, then broadcast at an unknown distance from the source. How much latency occurred there? The trick is to get the original source wave to roughly line up with the time the amplified wave leaves the PA speaker, otherwise weird echos are heard by the audience at best, and awful band-specific noise cancellation happens at worse.
• mnkmnk 4y ago
  Making a Bluetooth alternative, I think apple is the only company that can pull it off. But they will absolutely do it such that only their headphones will work with Apple devices. And then they will license other manufacturers to be able to use their tech to connect to apple devices. Otherwise, I see a huge opportunity for a consortium to develop a new hardware and software stack for high quality low latency audio and being them as a package to their products. I would love a completely wireless Dolby Atmos like setup with no central receiver, your mobile device itself being the av receiver. New speakers from any manufacturer and form factor could be added wherever you want as you buy them. Calibration according to your speaker placement would be wireless and automatic.
  • pjerem 4y ago
    > Making a Bluetooth alternative, I think apple is the only company that can pull it off. Microsoft did it with Xbox Wireless Protocol which is used to transfer input from controllers and high quality sound without latency. But, yes. It only works on Xbox or on Windows with an adapter and you can count the manufacturers using it one one hand. Microsoft being the thumb.
• atoav 4y ago
  I was thinking about something like Dante, AES50, AES67, AVB, Ultranet, Ravenna or any other of those professional Audio over Ethernet standards out there. Those are working and used in live venues and studios, the hardware used for those might however be out of scope in terms of price for the typical user and it certainly won't work with your smart speaker. Does that smart speaker have line in (3.5 mm TRS)? If so you could just send your audio analog over the ethernet cable and build an ethernet to TRS adapter on the other end : ) For longer distances balanced line drivers might be needed, tho. But shielded Ethernet cables work surprisingly well for analog audio purposes, especially if you send balanced signals through them. If you transformer-balance them you even get galvanic isolation for free.
• jhugo 4y ago
  There is a standard protocol for audio (and other realtime media) over an IP network: RTP. But your problem doesn't have anything to do with a lack of standards; Amazon has no incentive to just let you send RTP to the Echo Dot on a port — nobody is asking for that, and they would have no control over the "experience".
  • armagon 4y ago
    Good point -- I just put in a feature request, so now someone has asked for it. I don't see that this is any worse for the experience than the bluetooth situation. It'd certainly make the device more valuable for me. But that doesn't mean Amazon will see it as worth their time.
• m0shen 4y ago
  I haven't seen VBAN mentioned yet: https://vb-audio.com/Services/support.htm#VBAN https://vb-audio.com/Services/support.htm#VBAN https://vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/vban.htm https://vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/vban.htm It's a free, open protocol that runs on UDP, transmits PCM audio and MIDI
• Melatonic 4y ago
  If you don't like audio over ethernet do not even think about doing high quality video :-D Hate to say it but you are probably better off getting something other than Echo Dots for music. Too bad Google discontinued the Chromecast Audio - I love mine. The biggest plus for me is that once you have a compatible app (such as Spotify) streaming is done entirely on the chromecast audio from your internet itself instead of continuing to use your phones battery and wifi.
• hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I’ll link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514876 here, it may have valuable insight. I can use my hdmi ARC soundbar from my computer. We live in a backwards world.
• remram 4y ago
  I've run into this. I would like to use my Android phone as speaker and microphone for my laptop, so I can walk around without leaving my call. For some reason this is impossible, Bluetooth supports it of course, and so does Pulse Audio on my laptop, but an Android phone will only act as the host not the speaker/mic. I found SnapCast which lets me send audio from laptop to phone (with huge latency) but not the other way (phone mic to laptop).
• monocasa 4y ago
  > The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. ― Andrew S. Tanenbaum But really, RTP is the closest thing. Outside of the consumer space nearly everything is RTP + some out of band signalling protocol. It's low latency, designed to be multicast, has RFCs for evey codec under the sun, etc.
• unixhero 4y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-bluetooth-audio/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/what-you-need-to-kno...
• heavyset_go 4y ago
  The PulseAudio protocol supports network audio.
• xyzzy21 4y ago
  Firewire was supposed to be an AV standard that allowed connecting anything to anything and completely eliminate the RCA cables etc. And then the RIAA and MPAA discovered the plan and killed it good.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stuaxo 4y ago
  ROC looks pretty good.
• lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  A Hifi Berry [1] plus a speaker. The Hifi Berry is a Raspberry Pi hat. There are hats for digital output, analog output, and one with amplified analog output that can drive a 4ohm speaker quite respectably. I have some old Cambridge Soundworks speakers outside that I drove from a HifiBerry Amp2 hat for a while. Not quite enough power for outside so I switched to a Hifiberry DAC Pro and a pretty capable amp off eBay. The sub to go with them uses a HifiBerry DAC too. My main listening speakers are active digital speakers, with SPDIF inputs, and Hifi Berry Digi+. The HifiBerry has a RPi build you can just stick on a card, though I now use dietpi as it survives power loss better. Once that's done you can connect over wifi or wired, using Airplay, Roon, bunch of other things I forget. Basically you can run any music server on it, because linux. With Airplay or Roon (and probably others) you can make all the speakers in the house play the same music, which is awesome for parties. There's a bunch of manufacturers that make wifi/wired active speakers. Bluesound. KEF make some nice ones for $2000. Not portable, mind you. [1] https://www.hifiberry.com https://www.hifiberry.com
• TOGoS 4y ago
  I keep wanting JACK / netJACK[1] to be this. I've only actually gotten it to work once, though, and it required several hours of fiddling with configuration files and restarting daemons. Usually I run into a problem like...not being able to get certain applications on Windows to route audio through JACK at all. So, maybe the answer to your question is that there are too many standards for sending audio over the network, which means none of them get enough polish to really become the standard, with support on multiple platforms, requisite drivers actually working, etc. And this is why I string old-fashioned audio cables around my house. [1] https://jackaudio.org/faq/netjack.html https://jackaudio.org/faq/netjack.html
  • loa_in_ 4y ago
    If I was in Windows ecosystem I'd imagine there are some DLL injection that would make them work. I wonder if there's work going towards that.
• malthaus 4y ago
  As someone who produces music with synthesizers - there's also no (well working & established) standard for running/managing multiple audio sources over usb. There are some valiant efforts (e.g. Overbridge by Elektron), but even those took a lot of effort, are proprietary and buggy.
• AussieWog93 4y ago
  There is at least an attempt at WiFi audio I've seen in the wild, at IKEA of all places: https://www.ikea.com/au/en/cat/wi-fi-speakers-46194/ https://www.ikea.com/au/en/cat/wi-fi-speakers-46194/ No idea of the broader ramifications of this, but any move away from the shitshow that is Bluetooth can only be a good thing.
  • leoedin 4y ago
    The IKEA wi-fi speakers are running Sonos software internally. It's "yet another" wi-fi streaming platform - along with the offerings from Google, Apple, Spotify etc.
• MrMan 4y ago
  Dante? AVB? over tcp