Paul Davis wrote: > > >http://industryclick.com/magazinearticle.asp?magazineid=141&releaseid=9828&magazinearticleid=139756&siteid=15 > > and then write us an article on how you think it works internally ...
It's interesting, isn't it? I read another announcement about System Link a few weeks ago in Sound on Sound. (Sorry, I tried to find the news item on their website, but it doesn't seem to be on the web.) One thing they said was that System Link can link together PCs and Macs. This brings up the possibility of reverse-engineering the protocol and hooking it up to Linux as well... maybe. I'm not too happy about it being daisy-chained. There are some performance and reliability issues with that. Neither the Mix or Sound on Sound articles say clearly what the networking hardware is, but it seems that they are using digital audio - S/PDIF?? Or ADAT?? Odd, but I suppose it would get around latency and other issues with USB or Ethernet. I like the idea of being able to network computers together in the digital domain, and put the mixer (Cubase) on one system, while putting a software synth on another, and an effects rack on yet another. This is getting into what I/we wrote about here a long time ago: a networked audio architecture, where audio functions can be freely dispersed among hosts on a TCP/IP network. As for how it works, maybe they have encapsulated VST 2.0 protocol into a network protocol. That would enable communication among VST-enabled modules such as Cubase, soft synths, and effects. But they are saying that each computer can have someone working on a group project, all coordinated together. That's something I never thought of before, and I don't know what to make of it yet. Jay Ts
