| Abstract: |
Musicians
in a recording session are used to collaborating in real-time.
Distance makes this difficult and current technologies that
allow distance collaboration are either prohibitively expensive
or non real-time. The Network Audio Recording environment
is an object-oriented, client-server environment that enables
collaborative audio production over a distance by providing
real-time, full-duplex streaming of data over TCP/IP networks.
It establishes a custom messaging protocol on top of TCP/IP
to handle communication of audio and control information between
the client and server. It is designed and implemented in C/C++
for Macintosh PPC's using Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE. To handle
audio I/O, the system leverages the capabilities of Digidesign's
PCI audio cards and their freely available DirectIO SDK. Physically,
the system is implemented on a 100BaseT local ethernet network.
Network operations are implemented using Apple's OpenTransport
technology. The success of this project demonstrates that
inexpensive, real-time, collaborative audio on the internet
is within reach. This could be accomplished by adding a compression
component to the system to get the bandwidth requirements
within range and by supporting host-based audio such as Apple's
QuickTime or Microsoft's DirectX technologies. |
