Bitwig + Soundcraf Vi1 AES67 Demo 1

evilscientress — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 02:55:20 GMT

I just manged to do something that I wanted to do for quite some time.
I hooked up Bitwig, running on Linux, to my Soundcraft Vi1 digital mixing console via AES67. The complete round trip latency currently is 8 msec.
This is a short demo video with the In Cycles bitwig demo project.

I routed each track or group of tracks to the first 16 channels as 8 stereo tracks, plus the reverb and delay bus. Aux sends are still done in bitwig in the video, but I could have done them on the mixer.
It's not perfect yet, there are some random clicks that need debugging.

So how does it work?
On Linux I used the ravena aes67 alsa kernel module with the newer open source user space daemon: https://github.com/bondagit/aes67-linux-daemon
The Vi1 has a Dante card in it and uses the AES67 compatibility mode.
Bitwig directly uses the alsa device.