Hi,

we did a sound installation using 4 crappy consumer soundcards all controlled by one pd process, and it worked

Do you think it's possible on OS X 10.3?

With the packaged installer for OS X, as I posted earlier I couldn't even use a different number of ADC and DAC channels (Apparently a portaudio limitation, reported a list member) I used Soundflower virtual sound card as a trick.

So if you can share you experience, I will be delighted

I first had two separate goals:

1- Use my 6 channels sound card when I have only 2 channels input. This one is fixed by the use of Sound Flower.

2- Use a lot of cheap USB sound card for mic INPUT, say 10 * 2 Inputs. I suppose clock will not be a problem for Inputs? But I can't see how to do this one...

Thanks all, jln

IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

just to reiterate this for the archives with an anecdote: we did a sound installation using 4 crappy consumer soundcards all controlled by one pd process, and it worked, but the slight differences in each cards time sync meant that there were noticable clicks'n'pops and grinding sounds from the cards different cards. its a good way to do something for fun on the cheap, but *not* hifi in any way.

...

this depends. pd can not handle multiple soundcards that provide their own reference-clock to get the sampling-rate. if you have two (say) soundblaster-cards, chances are very low that their clocks will be exactly the same, e.g. one card will be clocked at 44100Hz and the other at 44098Hz. the 2 cards will get out of sync and after some time you will get a dac-slip on one of your outputs.

however, some cards can be synced - either by slaving them to wordclock or some digital audio signal (if they have digital I/O) or via some special onboard sync-cable (RMEhammerfall-cards have this feature so you can stack 2 cards)

how else am i supposed to get 48 channels out of my computer (in times prior to MADI) ?

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