Please Welcome Our Brand New Plug-In: Blue Cat's Connector!

[barza]

If I set the same buffer size as in the receiving application, the Blue Cat Connector receiver VST reports drop outs which at max out at 100 within a handful of seconds and the audio is completely broken up. The same is true if I set the buffer at whole number multiples of the buffer. If I raise the buffer to Max the frequency of dropouts decreases to one very 1-2 seconds but even with the higher latency there is still not an uninterrupted audio stream.

[Blue Cat Audio]

What matters here is the length of the buffer of the sender app (in case it's different from the receiver). In slave mode, the slave app synchronizes with the app sending (even empty) data to it.

[barza]

Buffer on "send" app is 256. Buffer on receiver app is the same. Cannot get an uninterrupted audio signal over the network with 256 as buffer, or any multiple thereof. Buffer at 1024 or 1280 the dropouts are every 1-2 seconds, which is about the best I can achieve, and further buffer increases have little effect. This is with no instances of VEP running, and no network traffic being generated I am aware of.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Buffer on "send" app is 256. Buffer on receiver app is the same. Cannot get an uninterrupted audio signal over the network with 256 as buffer, or any multiple thereof. Buffer at 1024 or 1280 the dropouts are every 1-2 seconds, which is about the best I can achieve, and further buffer increases have little effect. This is with no instances of VEP running, and no network traffic being generated I am aware of.

Can you remind me of your send app? When you talk about buffer size, that's the length of the buffer in the audio settings of the app, not in Connector, right?

[barza]

No - I am talking about the buffer setting in the receive instance of connector.

I have been tesing with two different applications to send audio from: Bitwig and Live. The buffer setting for the audio driver being used by each application is 256 samples, and I have not been changing it to test Connector.

I have been tesing with two differing "receive" applications: VEPro 7 on the same PC as Live/Bitwig, and Cubase on a networked PC. Buffer setting in the "recieve" application is that in the Cubase audio driver and is again 256 samples and not varied throughout testing.

I have then been changing the buffer setting in the "receive" instance of Blue Cat Connector to attempt to get uninterrupted audio, without success thus far.

If I have to raise the buffer in the audio driver panel of the 'receive' application in order to make Connector work, then that means higher latency even when I am not using Connector, which doesn't work for me.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Thanks for the details. With your setup I'd say that using 512 samples should indeed work, but every system is different. Have you tried to disable the firewall on both PCs? Sometimes it can slow things down quite a bit.

[GuiB]

Anyone using "Connector", do you know if the plugin would work correctly when doing a non-real-time (offline) rendering of the audio? I would like to use it to do some routing in my DAW, but I was wondering, since the audio is passed over the network, is the network fast enough to catch all the buffers or there will be drops?

Thanks for your help!

[Blue Cat Audio]

Anyone using "Connector", do you know if the plugin would work correctly when doing a non-real-time (offline) rendering of the audio? I would like to use it to do some routing in my DAW, but I was wondering, since the audio is passed over the network, is the network fast enough to catch all the buffers or there will be drops?

Thanks for your help!

If you are using the plug-in in "App" mode only within your application, it may work fine for offline rendering in many cases. But it depends on how the host application works for offline rendering, so you may want to try it out. When using the plug-in between several apps, non-realtime rendering will not work.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Due to high demand, the Connector introduction offer has been extended until tomorrow... Don't miss it!

[machinesworking]

I bought this, still haven't worked out MIDI with it, hopefully it's possible. Audio works great.
I love the price of this, but I would have easily accepted $10 more if Blue Cat had worked out exactly how to route audio and MIDI between the top 10 DAWs as examples. As it stands none of the tutorials deal with MIDI really at all. There's nothing more frustrating than spending hours with a piece of software only to realize it's not compatible with X app..

To be fair, this isn't a specifically Blue Cat issue, I'm dealing with a similar if not worse lack of documentation on Metagrid and what port it sends MIDI on etc. It's pretty common these days for manuals to be simply "Getting Started" guides instead of reference guides. Blue Cat already responded to my support request so kudos.

[machinesworking]

I worked out MIDI going from DP11 to Logic Pro so Alchemy works!

I have not been able to get Mainstage to recognize MIDI input from Connector which is a shame considering how light it is compared to Logic..

[machinesworking]

So, MainStage seems to be a no go. I really wish developers would talk about these things. The absolute first thing I wanted to try with Connector was to get Alchemy out of Logic/MainStage. It's hard for me to imagine that this isn't a known issue, that MainStage doesn't pass MIDI from the MIDI FX version of Connector to Alchemy etc. It works fine with Logic, but MainStage is a no go, which of course meant I spent way too long trying to figure out how to make it work... It's a great plug in, but I really wish there was at least one walk through with the MIDI, it works, but it's all trial and error on how to set it up for various DAWs.

[Blue Cat Audio]

We''ll have to try with MainStage and see if there is any way.

Regarding MIDI, it is unfortunately a pain in many hosts to do the routing, that's why we often recommend using PatchWork to host both virtual instruments and MIDI effects, as the routing is much easier and efficient. It is however not an option when you want to use the DAW's built-in plug-ins.

[SolarAxix]

From the first feedbacks I have from Gig Performer users, Connector seems to work very well. Any plan to extend this approach to the iPad? (competitors like Studiomux or MusicIO are by far not reliable enough for music on stage).

We currently have no plans for iOS, but who knows. If the intent is to deliver audio thru Wifi, there is however no chance that you can get reliable streaming.

I want to add my vote for iOS support. Pretty much all current iOS devices support the use of an Ethernet adapter either directly with a USB-C adapter on current gen iPad Air and iPad Pro tables and other devices with the camera connection kit (USB 3 version with a lightning port for additional power works the best unless using a powered USB hub). This should be more than enough to provide low-latency network connectivity to pass audio back and forth.

And there could still be some value for midi-only transfers over wireless too (either to or from another PCs/Macs or between iOS devices).

[ghettosynth]

Any thoughts on linux support?