What is the best way to setup a mixer/engineer to work remotely

[Doug Steinschneider]

I'm in IT and have worked with remote workers for 25 years going back to the first Citrix offerings. Audio isn't something we normally address, in fact when various remote software offerings began to support it, we found it an annoyance. 

I had a session yesterday where I thought I was going to help an audio engineer in another state copy over the Cakewalk project and audio files and then set him up the plugins we use. I estimated a couple hours of work and he would be mixing away. 

Instead I got pushback. They wanted to stream the audio from our mixing desktop back to their system and mix "remotely". 

I've been down this road during lockdowns. I helped several people use OBS, Voicemeeter and Cantabile to be able to give keyboard lessons remotely using Zoom. That was a long finicky process of trial and error that ultimately was successful for online keyboard lessons. 

Does anyone know a simpler way to route the Cakewalk ASIO audio over the internet to a remote computer? I tried installing just VB Cable which worked if we switched to MME but it sounded very distorted. 

Thanks in advance for any advice on this.

[jackson white]

'stream the audio' sounds like a challenge. most def -not- simpler, but perhaps something like Dante?

[Byron Dickens]

That sounds pretty stupid. I have never heard of anyone doing that; people just send the files back and forth.

[OutrageProductions]

7 hours ago, Doug Steinschneider said:

They wanted to stream the audio from our mixing desktop back to their system and mix "remotely". 

I'd hire a mix engineer that was competent.

Edited April 24 by OutrageProductions

[mettelus]

16 hours ago, Doug Steinschneider said:

Instead I got pushback.

I am in agreement with the posts above simply from this comment. If you haven't even started anything substantial with them and are already getting pushback, it is only going to get worse from there. I have never, and will never, chase someone down to give them money; that is simply not how real life works. Life is about time, and it doesn't take long to realize that lazy people end up being a time sink on your life.

Edited April 25 by mettelus

[Doug Steinschneider]

On 4/24/2024 at 4:08 PM, Byron Dickens said:

That sounds pretty stupid. I have never heard of anyone doing that; people just send the files back and forth.

That is exactly what I was thinking and I had a nice buttoned down file sync scenario ready but this has a happy ending because I decided that once in a while the customer is always right and I like to think out of the box when possible. 

On 4/24/2024 at 5:23 PM, OutrageProductions said:

I'd hire a mix engineer that was competent.

He's an excellent mixer that has a day job working in operations for "the worlds biggest band no one has heard of" ?

I thought to myself that this technically isn't that complicated so therefore someone has built a solution.

I looked around for several hours, found some opensource solutions like SonoBus that would involve opening firewall ports and other impossibilities when working with a remote person's network.

Then I stumbled across Audiomovers plugin ListenTo. I'm allergic to subscriptions for client software but if it involves a network component I'll consider it if the price is reasonable. They charge $100 a year and it couldn't be simpler. You put the plugin in the Master bus, sign in, choose audio codec (we picked PCM 24) and a latency setting we left at default.

We're using Jump Desk which is free to remote to the mixing PC. The "remote mixing engineer" fires up Cakewalk once remoted in and opens the ListenTo plugin and starts the stream which also copies a web URL that the remote user pastes into his local web browser. In that control you pick your local ASIO device and the level. 

One of the reasons I pursued this avenue is that I would have had to spend hours getting all the plugins installed on the remote user's PC. 

I compared a project I have a local copy of with the sound streaming from the remote - they sound identical.

I'm sorry this sounds like a native ad, if you look around this forum you know I'm a bargain hunter who doesn't like paying for stuff like this but in this case, it solves an ongoing headache I would be the support person for. I'm happy about this turn of events. 

 

Edited April 26 by Doug Steinschneider

[msmcleod]

You could take a look at ReaStream - it's a VST plugin that comes with Reaper.

IIRC, you put ReaStream on a bus,  then send your audio to it.  ReaStream then sends the audio stream out to a configured IP address/port.

On the other machine, you have ReaStream on another bus that is receiving the input audio via the network.

I think it's original design was for use over a LAN, so I've no idea how well it'll work over a WAN - it should work, but expect some significant latency.