How To Use Dante Devices in AES67 Mode with WheatNet-IP Devices

How To Use Dante Devices in AES67 Mode with WheatNet-IP Devices

If the Dante device supports AES67, this is how to integrate it into Wheatnet-IP:


NotesNOTE: The Wheatnet System must be running at 48K (Dante cards don't support 44.1 for AES67)

  • Put your Dante device on a static address in the WNIP subnet.
  • You need a PTP clock. The Dante device should provide this. Look in Dante Controller under Clock Status - as long as you have a Primary v2 Multicast Leader, you have PTP clock already. If not, you'll need a PTPv2 clock running in the WNIP subnet.
  • You will need to obtain a PTP license for Navigator (no charge) to lock the WNIP clock master to PTP.

 Then go into Navigator and go to the Info tab. Look under Clock Master Info.

Set the Primary External Reference to AES67-PTP. Navigator will prompt you for a license. Copy the seed and send it to us and we'll generate a key. no charge. After you have pasted in the key to unlock the feature, you will see the PTP Status go green. The domain should remain set to zero. If the status light for PTP is green, you're good.

At this point, what is happening is that your WNIP blade that is clock master is locking itself to the PTP clock. All the blades will lock to the WNIP metronome from the blade, all of the AES67 devices will lock to the PTP clock, and everyone will be time aligned.

Next step is to turn on AES-67 mode for the Dante device in Dante Controller. In Device Info, double click on the device and choose the AES67 Config tab. Set it to Enable. There is a place where you choose the RTP Multicast Address Prefix. Dante only lets you change the second octet and it chooses the other octets randomly. WNIP is by default 239.192.192.0 and above. To avoid Dante stepping on WNIP, set this prefix in Dante Controller to something outside of our range like 191. That way the Dante card will be living in 239.191.xxx.yyy and WNIP in 239.192.xxx.yyy and not conflict with each other. Click the button to reboot the AVIO dongle/Dante card to apply the changes.

Info
 The Dante card by default sends unicast to Dante devices. AES-67 is multicast. So you have to tell the device to create what Audinate calls a "Multicast flow" to get a AES-67 stream started. On your Dante device in Dante Controller, go to the Transmit tab. Look for the button with a dot with 2 arrows coming from it to open the Multicast Flow page.

Check AES-67 and tick the boxes for the left and right channels under "Add to New Flow". Click Create.

You will see the multicast IP address (239.192.191.1 on my system) and port number (5004) under Multicast Transmit Flows. You will need this in the next step.

Now let's go to Navigator and create the WNIP source for the stream that we just created.

Go to the Devices tab (below System) and pick AES67 Devices. Click the Add button on the far right.

Give it a name. Fill in the IP address of the Dante card (NOT the multicast flow!). Give it a host blade. The sources and destinations for this device will appear grouped with the host blade in the crosspoint grid. Save.

Now in the system tree, click on the device you just created.


IdeaTIP: you're not required to make a new device for every Dante card, but it does make it easier to manage. But depending upon how you are using these, you might make one device for a room and then setup the streams for all of the Dante things in a room on that device. It comes down to what makes sense for you.

You will be on the Sources tab. 

Click Add.

Give your source a name and then click on the Stream Info tab.

See how there's an entry there already? Click the Edit button so we can modify it.

Change the Multicast Address to match what is in your flow. In my example, it's 239.192.191.1. Change the port to 5004. Leave Payload Type at 100. The packet rate for the Dante card is 1ms. Ignore the section about Reference Clock, we don't need it. Click OK. Finish. Now you can route the audio coming from the Dante card to a destination on a blade.

Repeat the process to create a multicast flow for each microphone/device and matching source for each flow. This will put Dante sources into Navigator so you can route Dante sources to Wheatnet IP destinations

On the Dante Controller side, you need the RAV2SAP utility to transmit SDP information to Dante Controller to route WNIP sources to Dante destinations.

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