TWiRT 215 - Virtual Radio Console with Mike Dosch
Saturday, June 7, 2014 at 6:10PM
Touchscreen technology is mainstream - from iPads to cash registers. They’ve been an add-on or secondary console controller in radio studios for a couple years now. At the Spring NAB in Las Vegas, console maker Lawo introduced a new radio console designed specifically for touchscreen - even multi-touch - control. Mike Dosch, Director of Virtual Radio Projects at Lawo, joins us to describe the technology and where this tech could go in the future.
Links from the show:
Lawo crystalCLEAR radio console
Lawo Jade Engine and Jade Studio tools
Guest:
Michael Dosch, Director of Virtual Radio Projects, Lawo
Hosts:
Chris Tobin, IP-Solutionist
Kirk Harnack, VP - Telos Systems
Follow TWiRT on Twitter
TWiRT is brought to you by the Telos Hx6 and Telos iQ6 talkshow systems. Affordable, beautiful, and powerful, with the best-sounding phone hybrids ever made.
And by Lawo - maker of the new crystalCLEAR virtual radio console - Intuitive, progressive, and focused - crystalClear is the radio console with a mutli-touch touchscreen interface.
Reader Comments (3)
About the JADE Engine, we've had basically exactly this for well over a decade as a free open source studio grade low-latency software audio routing engine called the JACK Audio Connection Kit. It's been used in hundreds of radio stations alongside the Rivendell broadcast automation software for 10+ years. It started on Linux, but is now available cross-platform on Mac and Windows as well.
Hi Brian. Yes, I am quite familiar with Rivendell and the JACK Audio Connection Kit. It's good stuff! I did not know that it had crossed over from lovely Linux into the wild world of Windows. Good to know. Only one thing though...
I did speak in the interview about JADE's virtual audio routing capabilities, but this is only one attribute. It also is a full-featured console mixing engine, audio processing engine, VST Host, console GUI, and configuration change manager. But you're right to point out that the most important foundation to make Windows audio manageable is an internal router.
I hope I didn't suggest that JADE was the first. I just happen to think it's the most complete. But I could be a bit biased... :)
Catfish
Hi Brian,
thanks for your comment, let me put some additional points to the JADE picture.
The subject of making its audio handling smoother is certainly not a new one. As you have written, there are also other tools that are aiming towards this topic.
It was our goal to make a self contained Swiss-army knife PC audio solution that it is as complete and flexible as possible while being extremely easy to install and use. Furthermore we wanted to be compatible to as many PC surroundings as we could without the need for them to be specially prepared in advance.
Let highlight some JADE features to underline our approach:
- To interface audio software applications JADE supplies a multi-client capable virtual ASIO bridge with freely changeable channelcount that opens up an individual connection to each application using it. In addition JADE supplies up to four independent virtual WDM driver instances (each stereo in and out) to directly connect non-ASIO applications.
- JADE can interface multiple soundcards through ASIO and Windows Drivers (WASAPI/WDM-KS/MME) at the same time. This way you can combine audio coming from different cards or distribute a playback to various cards.
- JADE has VST Plugin host and ships additionally with a suite of audio processors that are taken from our big hardware consoles as well a suite of large scale audio meters.
- JADE has the RAVENNA AoIP natively integrated so it is able to directly exchange audio streams with other nodes in the IP network.
- Within the JADE environment all of these audio sources are part of a mixing engine that allows - next to plain routings - creating complete mixes with variable levels for each individual connection. For JADE it does not matter which origin or destination the audio signal has, everything is freely mixable.
- Multiple configurations can be setup, stored and reloaded during runtime. No stopping or restarting needed.
- Finally the JADE can remote controlled over an IP protocol called Ember+ which is open source and now widely spread in the broadcast industry. This way it is possible to integrate PC audio handling seamlessly with the traditional audio infrastructure.
To experience how all of that behaves in practice, you can download a 30-day trial version of both JADE products from our website.
Stephan
- Product Manager JADE -