Audio routing for remote control

General TouchDesigner Discussion
1

hi forum,

my friend and i are working on an A/V streaming soon and me being in charge of visuals. ideally the visual are generated in TD, responding to incoming audio signal. for the audio part, my friend is planning to use ableton for his mix and stream via OBS. What’s the simplest way to go about this audio signal to TD and back to OBS situation without costing one end’s entire bandwidth? frankly im a bit lost in this process, send help

2

I suppose you are on separate computers? If yes you can send video by NDI and OBS is able to receive it on the audio computer, or choose to put OBS on the video computer and receive sound by Dante or sound cards.
If video and audio are on the same computer, Ableton can send the audio via virtual cable and TD the video via Syphon/Spout. OBS can receive both and stream it together.
Test the different solutions in real conditions.

3

Continuing the discussion from Audio routing for remote control:

hi, first want to thank you for the reply. my friend and i are working on separate computers, and the issue remains the pipeline of audio to visual flow, since he is going to stream live on OBS. Are you suggesting that NDI top can receive an IP from OBS from my end, and using that audio to drive the visual before putting it out again to OBS?

4

Your question is really interesting and I was going to give you an answer using third-party tools but I realized you can do it using only OBS (with NDI plugin) and TouchDesigner.

  1. Stream audio from OBS to TouchDesigner using NDI.
  2. Retrieve your NDI signal using NDI In TOP into a Audio NDI CHOP.
  3. Compute your video…
  4. Stream your video to OBS using NDI Out TOP.
  5. Retrieve your NDI signal using NDI Source inside OBS.

This should generate quite some traffic, be sure to use unicast and not broadcast to avoid network latency (not sure if that’s possible, but NDI 3.x includes this capability).

Also, it’s important to say that network is the most important aspect of this kind of configuration.
Be sure to use a 1 Gbit/s router with both computers connected to it using Ethernet cable (at least CAT 6).

Tip 1 : you can start two instances of OBS, one to output the audio with a 1x1 scene (or a small-sized one), this can reduce bandwidth usage.
Tip 2 : instead of using two instances of OBS, you can use TouchDesigner on your streaming computer to send the audio to your VJing computer using Audio Device In and NDI Out CHOP with again, a 1x1 image.