Thought I would share my recent experiences with the AVB system for orchestral recordings and a novel idea for controlling the system from my DAW.

Last year I decided it was time to trade in my long and heavy multicores and multiple preamp systems for a unified system based around the RME AVB 12Mic and Digiface AVB units. I have relied on RME interfaces and preamps for many years and so was excited when they released the 12Mic units. Apart from the large contemporary sessions, I find most sessions can be handled with a 32 channel system, and so I opted for two 12Mic's and two AVB Tool's connected with two Presonus AVB Switches. I also bought some good quality Cat5 cable that is rubberised and feels almost like a microphone cable and had these placed onto reels to make rollout easy.

For all my location recordings I use Reaper, as I find it is very stable and the licensing scheme is very considerate. I also appreciate the large amount of scripting and customisation options it offers. With all the equipment mounted into some shallow 2RU cases, transport and setup is easy and convenient. 

Once installed into a venue and the stage setup, its time to attend to getting a balance going and set some levels. With my four AVB units this means jumping between four different Web pages to control the preamps. Until an official unified webapp is offered for the system and knowing that the WebApp is built on standard IP based technology, I wondered about making my own simple webapp to offer me all my systems gain controls on one page. It wouldn't be as elegant as the RME app but it would be what I would need during a session once all the routing and configuration has been done. After a day or some I got the beginnings of a solution working using MaxMSP and some NodeJS. Then as I was working on decoding the WebSocket data from the units to show the level meters working, it occurred to me that there was perhaps a much more elegant solution. 

As I am working in Reaper, I thought that I could bring all the control into Reaper as then I could adjust an input tracks Preamp gain via a custom Reaper Plugin and potentially use the Reaper track name to rename the Preamps and TotalMix. Enter your naming in one place and it goes everywhere! With some quick hacking of a Reaper JS plugin I got OSC being sent out of Reaper and to a NodeJS instance in MaxMSP that then sends on the gain and names to the appropriate preamp. At this stage its very much a hack, but I do have it running well. The main caveat is that I presently use the Track Number in reaper as the ID, so I need to have the first 32 tracks in Reaper equal the 32 RME preamps. In the future I will look into working around this. Unfortunately, I was unable to get TotalMix to respond to the OSC Track Name commands. It would be great to get this and also DigiCheck to respond. This sort of customisation is why I moved to the AVB based system. When I return to the studio I will upload some photo's of a recent session. 

I have had three seperate symphonic sessions with this RME based system and I am very pleased at the experience and results so far. Thanks RME.

(This was a very fast setup when this pic was taken, usually its a little more tidy.)