Hi, I’m Miguel Garcia from Audinate, and in this video we will share a tip on how production teams
and music educators alike can use Dante Via to better engage with their students
The COVID pandemic has forced everyone around the globe to rethink the future of education,
finding ways to make remote learning more engaging.
By now, audio enthusiasts and professionals alike have realized conferencing systems like
Zoom or Microsoft Teams use modern audio codecs. The poor sound we sometimes experience with them
has more to do with the USB and Bluetooth devices we are plugging in to them.
If you were going to record a song for distribution online, you wouldn’t give up on
quality and sing into this headset, right? Well, conferencing can benefit from the same approach
In your conference, try using a better microphone, and “WATCH” as people
complement the quality of your audio. Plus, more pleasant audio reduces ear fatigue, allowing
conferences to run longer and more productively. By using Dante Via, you can dramatically improve
conferencing audio quality, using Dante products you may already have or can get affordably.
Dante Via also allows you to route audio between applications on the computer.
For example, we could share the audio of production software like ProTools,
Cubase or Nuendo directly to the Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting.
Finally, we’ll have a short discussion with Dr Andrew Maz of Cerritos College in California. Dr
Maz was one of the first instructors we saw using Dante Via in this way, back in the Spring of 2020.
So first, let’s talk about Dante Via, and how it differs from Dante Virtual Soundcard.
Dante Virtual Soundcard was our first virtual Dante interface on a computer.
It is simple and lean – It can be used at the operating system level, playing out any system
sound – but that means your system alerts could be mixed in with your production audio if you aren’t
careful. So, Dante Virtual Soundcard is the right tool if you want a high channel count and low
latency to a single application - like a DAW. You can reconfigure the size of Dante Virtual
Soundcard, which is a good idea to save resources on the computer.
Dante Via is also a virtual soundcard, but it was designed to address a different set of challenges:
To adapt to the requirements of different applications, Dante Via
includes sample rate conversion and handles this automatically. The interface to the Dante network
will always be 48kHz, but you can now adapt to anything inside the computer.
Unlike DVS, Dante Via’s interface can expand on-the-fly. It can support 32 channels in total,
with up to 16 channels to a single program. Dante Via is able to work with
almost any audio interface – even built-in soundcards, USB or Firewire interfaces.
and we can expose them to the Dante network But more importantly, for conferencing use…
- We can internally route sound between applications.
You don’t have to send the audio out of a computer and then pull it back in somewhere else.
Now, all of this processing takes time in the system. So, Dante Via is good for conferencing,
in applications where you don’t want to hear yourself through the speakers or headphones.
However, it will be higher latency than Dante Virtual Soundcard.
So, Dante Virtual Soundcard and Dante Via each have strengths. DVS is simplicity, high channel
count and low latency. Dante Via may be a better choice for routing audio between applications
or using other audio hardware. If you get both as a bundle from Audinate, you can then choose the
right tool for what you are doing at the time. So, let’s do a demonstration.
All my computer’s sound sources and destinations show up in Dante Via… sources are in the left
column and destinations are on the right. I’ll put Dante Controller on the screen
so we can see how devices are dynamically exposed to the network.
Here I have the input to Zoom. If I click “Enable Dante”, it now shows up on Dante Controller.
If we want to use the output from Zoom, we’ll need to enable the transmission, as well.
While we are here, I’ll also expose the outputs for Nuendo and ProTools. You can see Dante Via has
kept the programs labelled for me, automatically. In the conference, I want to use this microphone.
It is already plugged in to my Focusrite X2P. In Dante Controller,
I’ll patch this mic from the Focusrite X2P,
to Zoom. If I open Zoom, we can confirm this patch and see the level meter moving as I speak.
If you don’t have a Dante mic input, you can also use a USB interface in Dante Via.
Here, I see my Steinberg audio interface – If that was my mic input I can drag that to Zoom.
Of course, since I have a Dante mic input, I don’t need that, we can delete it by clicking on the X.
But the point here is Dante Via means you don’t have to throw away
older interfaces. Dante Via allows for a more gradual transition towards a Dante infrastructure
OK, so we have a good microphone for our Zoom input – we also need to get the output of my
programs in to Zoom. To do that, just as we did for the USB interface, we drag the
DAWs on to the Zoom application. I’ll bring in both my ProTools session and my Nuendo Session.
With that, I’ll be able to flip between programs on the call.
Because different programs can run at different sample rates,
especially in production environments, Dante Via converts everything to 48kHz.
Now that we have multiple inputs coming in to Zoom, Dante Via will mix these together for us
So everything is in Zoom, we just need to set up our monitoring.
We’ll want to hear the output of Zoom, plus the output of our DAWs.
If you’re using a USB interface, we can mix the signals right in Dante Via. We just drag Zoom and
our DAWs to the USB output device. Again, we have a mixer and can adjust the levels there.
In our case I will delete them because I have an external mixer I want to feed everything to.
So, in Dante Controller, we can see I already exposed the outputs for Zoom,
ProTools and Nuendo. I’ll patch them into my mixer, and now I have physical fader controls.
From there, I patch my mixer output to my X2P,
where I control my speaker levels. We can now have our call, with direct patching for our
programs, a good mic and speakers. So we’ve shown how Dante Via works
and we’ve patched everything into it. Now, I’d like to introduce you to Dr
Andrew Maz - Chair of the Music Department and Lead of Commercial Music at Cerritos College
Dr Maz, can you start by telling us a bit about your program at Cerritos College?
I’ve been at Cerritos since 2012, I was hired to build the Commercial Music Program, So we
are in our 8 year, we have roughly 45 students in the program, So it is a small program,
but that enable students to really get a lot of hands on we’ve been teaching or I’ve been teaching
Dante to the students for the last three years because I think it is a fantastic technology,
we are incorporating into our new building. We use it for live sound, production since so fourth.
As we went into the COVID environment it became very clear that been able
for students to have this understanding of how digital technology works became more important.
When did you first start using Dante Via in remote collaboration?
I needed a way to be able to share my screen, share my audio quickly without having to
work to hard at it and the zoom audio driver was a little clumsy and difficult to manage, So I’ve
been reading up Dante Via not about for years and I thought well maybe that might be a solution. So,
I installed and run it, starting to experiment it and then I realized that it was pretty seamless.
Me with one students talking about Cubase and 10 minutes later open up Abbleton and still
have audio passing through the system. I’ve been a couple of students who have done a purchase
of Dante Via for their own use when they have to share their screen and do audio work with others.
What was your experience when you first started using Dante Via and what do the students think?
So, my experience was actually quite easy because you end up with sort of digital virtual patch bay
that allows you to route audio anywhere. I actually ending up using Dante Via as an
assignment for my summer class. So, I went to all my students to try it out and since it is a demo
they were able to download it and experiment it with it, one student was working in Cubase with
his music director at his church and he wanted to be able to play Cubase files to director
without having a deal with the clumsy mess of Zoom Audio and he just felt in love with it.
Do you think this is a tool you’ll use during the COVID pandemic and then drift away from,
or do you think this is here to stay? Personally, I think it’s here to stay I think
that education particularly with technology has the dynamic to change and anytime we introduce a
new way a new methodology of delivering content of providing support students gravity towards
and like it, so even when covid passes this is still gonna be a critical part my teaching and
a critical part of basically after hours support. Well, I think that is a great place to finish this
video on using Dante Via for collaboration. Thanks again to Dr Andrew Maz for joining us, thank you
for tuning in, and if you have any questions you can feel free to contact us at Audinate. ¡Adios!