5 ms·

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 th

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 5y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
hedora 5y 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 5y 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.
  - phlipski 5y ago
    Interesting. My experience with the Sonos app has been a revelation in GOOD audio networking experiences. It just works. I download the app - connect to a play 1/3/5 near me and stream music. All in the space of about 2 minutes. Nothing else I've tried comes close to this experience.
  - hedora 5y ago
    I've had a (S1) sonos for many years. That only happens to me if the speakers (or phone) are repeatedly falling off the WiFi network. Try plugging into Ethernet, or placing it close to your router. If that fixes it, then you have a root cause.
    - darrenf 5y ago
      The roam has no Ethernet port. It holding a wifi signal has never been a problem (if I set it playing something, I can’t recall it ever having stopped) Someone else has contacted me privately and recommended I switch off private MAC address on my phone. That seems to have improved things.
- yehBu77 5y ago
  In true HN fashion they ignore people were pirating and streaming content to multiple rooms before a big company brand caught onto the idea and profited from it. I have multi-room streaming using “dumb” speakers, and copper wire (for audio and network). I control one content box and aim it at different speakers from my phone, tablet, laptop. Siri Shortcuts decouple me from waiting for an MBA to approve adding voice commands. I know; brave flex sticking with simple wire versus going wireless.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > In true HN fashion, first-mover / market-leader Sonos isn't even mentioned yet. market leader? no idea. first-mover? wrong. Slim Devices were the first mover in this space with the Squeezebox (subsequently purchased by Logitech). Sonos came shortly afterwards.
duped 5y ago
In the pro world there was Dante, Ravenna, and to a lesser extent AVB. People didn't like that nothing worked with each other. The AES got the AoIP manufacturers together and standardized a union of these technologies and called AES67. Now most pro gear is compatible and it is in widespread use in (mostly) large audio installations (think stadiums/venues, broadcast, theme parks, etc). There's not much in way of open source solutions to using it, and not many devices you would want to buy as a consumer that uses it, however.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  > There's not much in way of open source solutions to using it But there are some? Can an arbitrary Linux box or Raspberry Pi be fitted with free software to receive AES67 over Ethernet from commercial solutions, or is there a catch?
  - duped 5y ago
    There's a kernel module for handling the networking connection and exposing it as an alsa device: https://bitbucket.org/MergingTechnologies/ravenna-alsa-lkm/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/MergingTechnologies/ravenna-alsa-lkm/s..., and some FOSS stuff for managing the discovery/control layer. It's not as simple as plugging in a USB device and selecting your i/o, though.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      That kernel module userland part has an EULA that makes it very much non-free, is it required or do the FOSS alternatives work with the kernel module?
  - kierank 5y ago
    Ooooh something I know quite a lot about: So for AES67 receive, in principle no as PTP stack exists for RPI yet. You could cheat like the majority of manufacturers do and just play the audio as it arrives instead of using the timestamps. You'd also need a way of drifting the audio out clock to match the frequency of the PTP clock. If you didn't care about bitexact audio, you can resample, though ALSAs clock measurement kind of sucks.
jasode 5y 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. It's because the replies are interpreting the op's question differently from the intent. When op asks: "why there isn't a standard protocol?" -- he's asking "why isn't there a SingleDominantThatWorksOnOnEveryDevice audio protocol that lets me connect devices seamlessly?" The op's word of "standard" is just doing a lot of heavy lifting to convey a frustration with stuff not working intuitively. The analogy is TCP/IP being a standard (SingleDominantThatWorksOnOnEveryDevice) network protocol that won over Apple AppleTalk, Novell SPX/IPX, and Microsoft LANMAN NETBIOS. But many replies interpreted "standard" as "any available existing specification regardless of marketshare or device availability" -- so that's where you get various examples of audio protocols that are idiosyncratic to particular domains which are not analogous to the ubiquity and reliability of TCP/IP. E.g. the Dante audio protocol which doesn't seem relevant to op's use case. And what's the scope of an "audio protocol"? Is it a "media query of music files" protocol like DLNA? Or is it a "virtual hardware audio device endpoint" like Bluetooth Audio?
- armagon 5y ago
  Yes, that's what I meant. Why isn't there a widely interoperable audio-over-the-network transmission protocol I can use, so that when I am playing sound (from a song, a video, or a game), I can hear it on an external speaker? [The scope is just a 'virtual hardware audio device endpoint' like bluetooth audio]
  - creeble 5y ago
    As someone who works on the code for a competitor of Sonos, the answer is that it is hard to do, depending on your requirements. > ...(from) a video, or a game So then you need low latency, like less than 10ms? So that lip-sync works, and the game is playable? Do you need it distributed across different endpoints, also with low latency? Does it need to run using unreliable WiFi connections, and not kill all audio just because one endpoint is under-performing? These are all hard, hard enough that doing it well (and keeping it proprietary) makes companies like Sonos big. OTOH, streaming mp3 from one endpoint to another is trivial.
paxys 5y ago
That's because "sending audio over a network" isn't a single self-contained problem but a huge area which requires lots of different approaches depending on the specific use case.

averagedev 5y ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

hedora 5y 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 5y 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.
- phlipski 5y ago
  Interesting. My experience with the Sonos app has been a revelation in GOOD audio networking experiences. It just works. I download the app - connect to a play 1/3/5 near me and stream music. All in the space of about 2 minutes. Nothing else I've tried comes close to this experience.
- hedora 5y ago
  I've had a (S1) sonos for many years. That only happens to me if the speakers (or phone) are repeatedly falling off the WiFi network. Try plugging into Ethernet, or placing it close to your router. If that fixes it, then you have a root cause.
  - darrenf 5y ago
    The roam has no Ethernet port. It holding a wifi signal has never been a problem (if I set it playing something, I can’t recall it ever having stopped) Someone else has contacted me privately and recommended I switch off private MAC address on my phone. That seems to have improved things.
yehBu77 5y ago
In true HN fashion they ignore people were pirating and streaming content to multiple rooms before a big company brand caught onto the idea and profited from it. I have multi-room streaming using “dumb” speakers, and copper wire (for audio and network). I control one content box and aim it at different speakers from my phone, tablet, laptop. Siri Shortcuts decouple me from waiting for an MBA to approve adding voice commands. I know; brave flex sticking with simple wire versus going wireless.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> In true HN fashion, first-mover / market-leader Sonos isn't even mentioned yet. market leader? no idea. first-mover? wrong. Slim Devices were the first mover in this space with the Squeezebox (subsequently purchased by Logitech). Sonos came shortly afterwards.

duped 5y ago

In the pro world there was Dante, Ravenna, and to a lesser extent AVB. People didn't like that nothing worked with each other. The AES got the AoIP manufacturers together and standardized a union of these technologies and called AES67. Now most pro gear is compatible and it is in widespread use in (mostly) large audio installations (think stadiums/venues, broadcast, theme parks, etc). There's not much in way of open source solutions to using it, and not many devices you would want to buy as a consumer that uses it, however.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
> There's not much in way of open source solutions to using it But there are some? Can an arbitrary Linux box or Raspberry Pi be fitted with free software to receive AES67 over Ethernet from commercial solutions, or is there a catch?
- duped 5y ago
  There's a kernel module for handling the networking connection and exposing it as an alsa device: https://bitbucket.org/MergingTechnologies/ravenna-alsa-lkm/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/MergingTechnologies/ravenna-alsa-lkm/s..., and some FOSS stuff for managing the discovery/control layer. It's not as simple as plugging in a USB device and selecting your i/o, though.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    That kernel module userland part has an EULA that makes it very much non-free, is it required or do the FOSS alternatives work with the kernel module?
- kierank 5y ago
  Ooooh something I know quite a lot about: So for AES67 receive, in principle no as PTP stack exists for RPI yet. You could cheat like the majority of manufacturers do and just play the audio as it arrives instead of using the timestamps. You'd also need a way of drifting the audio out clock to match the frequency of the PTP clock. If you didn't care about bitexact audio, you can resample, though ALSAs clock measurement kind of sucks.

jasode 5y 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. It's because the replies are interpreting the op's question differently from the intent. When op asks: "why there isn't a standard protocol?" -- he's asking "why isn't there a SingleDominantThatWorksOnOnEveryDevice audio protocol that lets me connect devices seamlessly?" The op's word of "standard" is just doing a lot of heavy lifting to convey a frustration with stuff not working intuitively. The analogy is TCP/IP being a standard (SingleDominantThatWorksOnOnEveryDevice) network protocol that won over Apple AppleTalk, Novell SPX/IPX, and Microsoft LANMAN NETBIOS. But many replies interpreted "standard" as "any available existing specification regardless of marketshare or device availability" -- so that's where you get various examples of audio protocols that are idiosyncratic to particular domains which are not analogous to the ubiquity and reliability of TCP/IP. E.g. the Dante audio protocol which doesn't seem relevant to op's use case. And what's the scope of an "audio protocol"? Is it a "media query of music files" protocol like DLNA? Or is it a "virtual hardware audio device endpoint" like Bluetooth Audio?

armagon 5y ago
Yes, that's what I meant. Why isn't there a widely interoperable audio-over-the-network transmission protocol I can use, so that when I am playing sound (from a song, a video, or a game), I can hear it on an external speaker? [The scope is just a 'virtual hardware audio device endpoint' like bluetooth audio]
- creeble 5y ago
  As someone who works on the code for a competitor of Sonos, the answer is that it is hard to do, depending on your requirements. > ...(from) a video, or a game So then you need low latency, like less than 10ms? So that lip-sync works, and the game is playable? Do you need it distributed across different endpoints, also with low latency? Does it need to run using unreliable WiFi connections, and not kill all audio just because one endpoint is under-performing? These are all hard, hard enough that doing it well (and keeping it proprietary) makes companies like Sonos big. OTOH, streaming mp3 from one endpoint to another is trivial.

paxys 5y ago

That's because "sending audio over a network" isn't a single self-contained problem but a huge area which requires lots of different approaches depending on the specific use case.