Highly experimental for now. I don't recommend using it for serious purposes.

However, chances that it'll break already working Dante network are low.

Big thanks to Project Pendulum (by Trifecta Tech Foundation) for creating and maintaining Statime and collaboration on features needed for audiovisual networks functionality! Audio transmission would be much more difficult to implement without it.

• receiving audio from and sending audio to Dante devices and virtual devices
• connections can be made using Dante Controller or network-audio-controller (netaudio command line tool)

• ✅ - usable
• 💣 - experimental
• ☑️ - not a part of this software but integration is easily possible
• ⏳ - will be implemented soon (in 2024 probably)
• 🚫 - unimplemented and not planned for the near future

• Dante protocol is undocumented. Everything was reverse-engineered or based on other reverse-engineering projects. Some things in implementation were guessed. So while it works with my setup, it may not work with yours.
• channel names can't be changed. If you try to change them, Dante Controller may get confused
• receiving from multicast flows isn't supported yet, unicast connection will be made
• Inferno2pipe is clocked by incoming media flows. When nothing is connected, "time will stop" (i.e. recording will pause) until something is connected again - silence won't be generated unless at least one channel is connected.
• it will not start if there is no default route in OS routing table

Disclaimer: Dante uses technology patented by Audinate. This source code may use these patents too. Consult a lawyer if you want to:

• make money of it
• distribute binaries in (or from) a region where software patents apply

This project makes no claim to be either authorized or approved by Audinate.

1. Install Rust
2. If wanting to use anything other than Inferno2pipe, clock synchronization daemon is needed. Inferno is compatible with modified Statime:
   • Enable AES67 in at least 1 device in the network. Otherwise Statime which is PTPv2-only won't be able to get timestamps from PTPv1 used by Dante. It will be fixed soon - a workaround exists but wasn't merged yet with other changes.
   • git clone -b inferno-dev https://github.com/teodly/statime
   • cd statime && cargo build
   • sudo target/debug/statime -c inferno-ptpv2.toml
3. Clone this repo with --recursive option (some dependencies are in submodules)
4. cd to the desired program/library directory
   • simple command line audio recorder: Inferno2pipe
   • virtual soundcard for ALSA: alsa_pcm_inferno - also works with PipeWire, should work with JACK (not tested yet)
   • virtual soundcard for PipeWire: inferno_wired
5. cargo build
6. Follow the instructions in README of the specific program/library

• Audinate AVIO AES3
• Ben & Fellows 523019 4x4 balanced analog I/O module (based on Dante UltimoX4)
• Klark Teknik DN32-DANTE (based on Dante Brooklyn II)
• Soundcraft Vi2000
• Dante Via @ OS X
• Dante Virtual Soundcard @ Windows 10

• Dante Controller @ Windows 10, 11
• network-audio-controller

• x86_64 Linux
  • Arch
  • Ubuntu
  • Fedora

• inferno_aoip - main library crate for emulating a Dante audio over IP device. In the future controller functionality will also be implemented. Start here if you want to develop your app based on Inferno.
• inferno2pipe - capture audio, writing interleaved 32-bit integer samples into an Unix named pipe (or a raw file). Helper script for recording to more convenient format is also provided. Start here if you want to use Inferno for capturing audio without setting up whole audio stack
• alsa_pcm_inferno - virtual soundcard for ALSA. Start here if you want functionality similar to DVS
• searchfire - fork of Searchlight mDNS crate, modified for compatibility with Dante's mDNS
• cirb - Clock-Indexed Ring-Buffer - fork of rt-history crate with emphasis on allowing reordered incoming packets and clock synchronization

• INFERNO_BIND_IP - which local IP to bind to. Specifying it may be necessary if you have multiple network interfaces
• INFERNO_DEVICE_ID - 16 hexadecimal digits (8 bytes) used as a device ID. Dante devices usually use MAC address padded with zeros. Inferno uses 0000<IP address>0000 by default. Device ID is the storage key when saving state.
• INFERNO_NAME - name of advertised device. If unspecified, name based on app name and IP address will be generated.
• INFERNO_SAMPLE_RATE - sample rate this device will operate on

Issue reports and pull requests are welcome. However I'm currently taking a break from this project and will be back in June or July 2023.

By submitting any contribution, you agree that it will be distributed according to the comment found at the top of inferno_aoip/src/lib.rs file - under the terms of GNU GPL v3 or any later version.

Please use editor respecting .editorconfig (for example, VSCode needs an extension: EditorConfig for VS Code) or configure it approprietly manually.

• introduced ALSA PCM plugin - a virtual soundcard compatible with most Linux audio apps
• receive clock using a documented protocol: usrvclock
• various internal changes primarily related to allowing the use of external buffers (needed for mmap mode in ALSA plugin)

• audio transmitter
• alpha version of Inferno Wired - virtual audio source & sink for PipeWire
• receiving clock from Statime modified for PTPv1 and virtual clock support - Linux-only for now (because CLOCK_TAI is Linux-only)
• increased receive thread priority to reduce chance of OS UDP input queue overflow

initial release

likely in order they'll be implementated

• use multicast flows when available
• ability to change channel names and settings in Dante Controller

At this point, Inferno will roughly become alternative to Dante Virtual Soundcard.

• integration with JACK
• send statistics (clock, latency, signal levels)
• ability to work as a clock source (PTP leader)
• ability to use non-default network ports to allow running multiple instances on a single IP address
• automated integration test that will launch several instances, stream audio data between them and check for its correctness
• bit-perfect transmitter (currently 32-bit integers are always used internally and conversion to 24-bit or 16-bit adds dither)
• API: number of channels changeable without device server restart (useful for Dante Via-like operation where transmitters & receivers can be added and removed dynamically)
• AES67
• primary & secondary network support, for dual-NIC computers
• grep -r TODO inferno_aoip/src

• 99% safe Rust (unsafe is required only because PipeWire Rust bindings return raw buffers and because ALSA plugin API doesn't have safe Rust bindings)
• no external libraries needed, the only dependencies are Rust crates

I've been using free as in freedom, open source software for many years now. I'm also fascinated by connections between music and technology. One day my sound engineer collegue showed me how Dante works, how easy to use and (most of the time) stable it is. The problem was that it's not an open standard, didn't have open source implementation and I couldn't use it on my favourite operating system - Linux. Now I can.

• network-audio-controller - command line connection and device controller, alternative to Dante Controller
• dante-aes67-relay.js - Relay a Dante multicast stream to AES67
• wycliffe, receiver implementation contained in a video control software
• List of AES67 audio resources at AES67 Stream Monitor website (Dante is AES67-compatible but not on all devices and requires manual configuration)