<< Solved >> Anyone Have Experience with Dante Audio System in a Hackintosh?

[soeryobadja]

Hi all,

Anybody here has experience running Dante System (specifically, Dante Virtual Soundcard and Dante Controller) in a hackintosh, specifically an iMac Hackintosh?

I previously ran Dante system using 2 different hackintosh based on Thinkpad laptop, one a T440 Haswell and other one a T460s Skylake both with Intel LAN card without any problem. Running smoothly for audio recording multi track purpose.

Now, I have another build; based on Gigabyte Z390UD board, i9-9900K, Radeon 5500XT with onboard RTL8111 LAN recognized as en0 and builtin, iMac19,1; which not able to run the Dante with the following symptom:
1. DVS runs correctly in the en0 and it is also recognized correctly in the Dante Controller.
2. If there is no other Dante source in the network, the system works normal.
3. Whenever another Dante source is present in the network, the hackintosh start to behave abnormally, i.e. become laggy, and by Activity Monitor I see that kernel_task is active and having load to 100% at single core, moving from one core to another. This makes all the system becomes laggy and the sound from Dante input cannot be used. As well, the hackintosh is not worthy to be used for any other purpose.
4. At first I thought it is because the RTL LAN Chip (different with the Intel chip used in both Thinkpad laptops), so I put a second LAN Card Intel I210 which is natively recognized by macOS and runt he DVS and all the other Dante source through this second network card. Yet, the problem persist.

I tried to search through google for this symptom but not found any lead, therefore it is a specific problem. Anyone maybe can share his thought on where should I look further for this issue?

One note, the LAN Card of RTL8111 in the IO Registry plane is under PCI0@0 => AppleACPIPCI => RP03@1C,2 => IOPP => PXSX@0 => RTL8111 => en0. Is this also the way the LAN card is described in the real iMac? Referring to my Thinkpad laptop, the LAN card is registered under PCI0@0 => AppleACPIPCI => IGBE => IntelMausi => en0. Does this contribute to the problem?

As I have my second LAN Card, is there any way to disable completely the RTL onboard LAN Card (therefore not having the RTL kext) and define my add-on Intel LAN Card as builtin?

Thanks in advance for any advise and guidance.

 

[Henties]

I have been using a number of Dante AIO devices as well as Audinate's VSC and VIA software solutions for quite a number of years and without problems, all on a cat 6 based gigabit ethernet backbone using unmanaged switches. My workstation "hacks" are equipped with ESI's MAYA44e or MAYA44ex add on sound cards which I prefer above the normal onboard solution integrated on the respective mobos. I do however still use the onboard sound for normal alerts.

In addition I use a 2nd USB 100 megabit Ethernet adapter on my workstations dedicated exclusively for my Dante packetised audio traffic as well a the Dante controller.

My Dante traffic is usually "injected" into the network in multicast mode.

In your case I would therefore suggest to check that:

your Dante ethernet ports are not running in energy efficient mode

and that you test using multicast packets to see if that makes a difference. Multicast packets reduce computing overhead quite significantly.

It appears to me that your new build suffers from some or other computing bottleneck which when resolved should also fix your Dante sound.

Also check that your sample rate that your Dante devices/software uses matches that of your respective audio device.

Note: Using a 100 mbit USB network adaptor for Dante in Windowz 10 is problematic because of the inefficient way that Microsoft handles network resources.
SAMBA/CIFS and other Microsoft protocols are banned on my Network because they are far too chatty, consuming precious bandwidth, which I rather need for my regular networking activities. The only protocols, other than TCP and UDP, that I use (allow) is NFS over TCP so that I also benefit from TCP's acknowledgement feature as well as allowing me to route and receive traffic from outside my local Network.

Hoping this will assist you in getting your Dante network to work the way it is intended.

Greetings Henties

 

[PTuser]

Hi all,

Anybody here has experience running Dante System (specifically, Dante Virtual Soundcard and Dante Controller) in a hackintosh, specifically an iMac Hackintosh?

I previously ran Dante system using 2 different hackintosh based on Thinkpad laptop, one a T440 Haswell and other one a T460s Skylake both with Intel LAN card without any problem. Running smoothly for audio recording multi track purpose.

Now, I have another build; based on Gigabyte Z390UD board, i9-9900K, Radeon 5500XT with onboard RTL8111 LAN recognized as en0 and builtin, iMac19,1; which not able to run the Dante with the following symptom:
1. DVS runs correctly in the en0 and it is also recognized correctly in the Dante Controller.
2. If there is no other Dante source in the network, the system works normal.
3. Whenever another Dante source is present in the network, the hackintosh start to behave abnormally, i.e. become laggy, and by Activity Monitor I see that kernel_task is active and having load to 100% at single core, moving from one core to another. This makes all the system becomes laggy and the sound from Dante input cannot be used. As well, the hackintosh is not worthy to be used for any other purpose.
4. At first I thought it is because the RTL LAN Chip (different with the Intel chip used in both Thinkpad laptops), so I put a second LAN Card Intel I210 which is natively recognized by macOS and runt he DVS and all the other Dante source through this second network card. Yet, the problem persist.

I tried to search through google for this symptom but not found any lead, therefore it is a specific problem. Anyone maybe can share his thought on where should I look further for this issue?

One note, the LAN Card of RTL8111 in the IO Registry plane is under PCI0@0 => AppleACPIPCI => RP03@1C,2 => IOPP => PXSX@0 => RTL8111 => en0. Is this also the way the LAN card is described in the real iMac? Referring to my Thinkpad laptop, the LAN card is registered under PCI0@0 => AppleACPIPCI => IGBE => IntelMausi => en0. Does this contribute to the problem?

As I have my second LAN Card, is there any way to disable completely the RTL onboard LAN Card (therefore not having the RTL kext) and define my add-on Intel LAN Card as builtin?

Thanks in advance for any advise and guidance.

I run dante on my system but I would advise against using virtual sound card. I have a focusrite PCIE card and I use a dedicated point to point ethernet connection. Dante will not perform to any standard using your regular ethernet shared connection. DVS is laggy....

 

[Henties]

@PTuser no ways, all Dante stuff that I own, and that is quite a considerable lot, software and hardware devices included, work like a dream provided you stick to the rules when setting up your Dante network.
The fact that you are having problems does not justify condemning some of Audinate's products the way you do. DVS is not laggy by any standard, setup your network properly and read what I had to say about Samba/Cifs as well as multicasting Dante's audio injection on a network, especially when you are using multiple devices that sync to your injected audio concurrently. Dante works well on 100 mbit and higher speed networks, shared or not, only Windows has problems with Dante and 100 mbit networks due to numerous very chatty protocols that are usually enabled by default and often revert back to default automatically after one has disabled them, without you ever knowing unless you specifically investigate yourself.

Greetings Henties

 

[zipb]

Use a separate 1 GbE network for Dante, eg a separate port(builtin/thunderbolt/usb to ethernet), dedicated GbE switch(-es) and all will be fine. Sharing ports/switches with other network traffic is quite possible, but needs planning and some IT skills.
DVS works OK, but gives 4 mS extra latency(and less channels at higher SR's) that you don't have with a proper Dante Focusrite/Yamaha PCIe card(or the RME USB Digiface Dante).
If you only need one audio interface, you might as well get something with Thunderbolt or USB.

 

[soeryobadja]

Thanks @Henties for your great advise.
My experiences with Dante pretty much align with your comment. Great experience working with Dante, especially on the fact they are running on top of ethernet with ease of deployment. I don't use dante that frequent though, but everytime I use it Dante was always a great experience.

Back to my issue. Turns out, the culprit is the BIOS on my Gigabyte Z390UD. It has F9 BIOS, which when I read into the update list shows that the F9 BIOS provide support for i9-9900KS. It might relates with my problem on CPU utilization when running DVS, then I tried to downgrade the BIOS to F8n (similar to the BIOS version used in my test computer using same Gigabyte Z390UD which runs DVS smoothly), and now DVS runs very smooth in my machine.

I also used similar setup like recommended by @zipb , separating the Dante network using secondary NIC card to an unmanaged hub with Cat6 connection and it works very well. As my setup is not pure for studio but for a live streaming setup, the network for Dante is combined with network for NDI camera, which works well in my setup. The delay is still very good, still below 5ms, which is more than enough for my setup.

My main network for this machine is connected to a Mikrotik CRS router with VLAN setup, which gives periodical glitch every few seconds. I thought it has something to do with the VLAN, I have not look at it further since I setup using secondary NIC Card to separate the network.

Thanks for the recommendation on the multicast. I have not set it up yet, will do so soon especially when the audio installation growing larger in the future.

Thanks again for all your contribution, @Henties @zipb @PTuser