H9000R and Mac mini’s

[QJM]

Hi All,

I have been chopping at the bit to get a H9000R and here in Sydney I’ve just sent away for a quote so i am pretty excited.

I use Logic in a small set up with two mac mini’s. I would like to get the dante option card to get a network going with both mac mini’s and also use the anolog inputs and outputs to interface with a few outboard bits and peaces and maybe even the XLR outs for my speakers. (goodbye old soundcard)

What do you think, am i being to ambitious, is there a better way?

The mac mini’s ethernet ports are networked and used for backup and file shareing so I would get a couple of Thunderbolt to 10GB Ethernet Adapters for the dante network.

Does anyone have the H9000 hooked up to a mac mini or two? I would love to hear from you if so

any info you might like to share would be gold and thanks in advance.

 

 

 

[jbamberg]

QJM wrote:

Hi All,

I have been chopping at the bit to get a H9000R and here in Sydney I've just sent away for a quote so i am pretty excited.

I use Logic in a small set up with two mac mini's. I would like to get the dante option card to get a network going with both mac mini's and also use the anolog inputs and outputs to interface with a few outboard bits and peaces and maybe even the XLR outs for my speakers. (goodbye old soundcard)

What do you think, am i being to ambitious, is there a better way?

The mac mini's ethernet ports are networked and used for backup and file shareing so I would get a couple of Thunderbolt to 10GB Ethernet Adapters for the dante network.

Does anyone have the H9000 hooked up to a mac mini or two? I would love to hear from you if so

any info you might like to share would be gold and thanks in advance.

This is interesting.  Are you running two Logic sessions in parallel across the two computers?  Personally I'm a fan of Dante in that it gives you a lot of flexibility for this sort of setup.

I looked up whether running multiple Dante Virtual Soundcards on a network is supported and it is –

see https://www.audinate.com/learning/faqs/can-i-use-dante-virtual-soundcard-with-multiple-computers

You can use the Thunderbolt Ethernet adapters to connect the Dante card to your Mac Minis (although the Dante ports are 1GB/s not 10).  As you've seen in another thread, there are two primary and two secondary ports on the Dante card, so you could connect to both computers without a separate switch (assuming you don't have any other Dante equipment to hook up).

Then you could use Dante Controller to connect the computers to the 32 channels of IO on the H9000 in whatever configuration you need.

One consideration when using the H9000 as a sound card is that it doesn't currently have a way to control levels on Direct IO connections.  So any channels you have routed directly from your computer's Dante outs to your analog outs on the H9000 will not have level controls in the H9000.  This is something we're planning to address in a software update, though.

 

[jbamberg]

I realized I should have mentioned the control aspect.  Especially if you're using an H9000R, you will need a network to connect your computers to the control port of the H9000R.  You can either run the control traffic over the audio network, or over the main (file sharing and backup) network.  The latter is probably better, because your main network is probably connected to the Internet, so your H9000R will be able to access software updates, etc, and you will keep your real-time audio traffic separate from everything else.

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