R3lay VSC (Virtual Sound Card)

R3lay VSC is another program in the R3lay suite that, like virtual patchbay, can be used to get audio in and out of the frame, if you have the third party AOIP license o your IPA card.

You can get a demo of the R3Lay patchbay product here: https://lawo.com/products/r3lay-vsc/

The demo is fully functional and allows 2-way AES67 streams, but after 15 minutes it will start to add white noise into the streams once a minute. This is great for testing, if you want to use it in a real production environment, reach out to Lawo for pricing.

VSC Setup

Run the installer for VSC and get a NIC (lan port) on your computer onto the AES-67 capable network that your E-IPA’s AOIP NIC (LAN port) is on. You’ll want to put your PC’s NIC onto the same unicast subnet as the IPA card, and it is highly recommended that PC NIC associated with you R3LAY VSC gets used for AOIP only (not for internet or any other traffic), so as to avoid network issues.

Open

Open

Click on the Lawo icon at the top right to get into the settings menu. In the ravenna menu, set your NIC settings, Multicast and PTP for your user case. Clear-Com Default PTP domain is 127, DSCP of 46, and I would set your multicast addresses to be fixed and put it in the same space as streams coming from the frame, being careful to not create IP conflict. Before you do anything, check you have PTP. You should see the Sync button on the home screen turn blue, and see appropriate settings under diagnostics>sync.

Next, give your first output stream a name by clicking on the grey box on the right side, and set it to active by clicking on the active button. Then, we’re going to pull its SDP so we can add it to an Eclipse AES67 3rd party port. You'll find it under diagnostics>Send. Scroll all the way to the bottom to find the SDP, and copy it to a notepad. This will make sure that line breaks and formatting is preserved.

EHX Setup and Adding the Listener Side

Open up EHX, Lawo VSC requires a packet time of 1, so right click on your IPA card in cards and ports, and under protocol settings change packet time to 1ms. This will interrupt audio across the card, so be careful.

We’re going to create a port, which I’m just going to call “Frame2Lawo” in which we’ll have our TX and RX streams on. In the RX side, you’re going to hit sdp record>view AOIP SDP, and paste the SDP we got from the send side of VSC.

Adding the Talker Side

Now we’re going to do the reverse. Go to the tx side of the port you have for IPA>VSC, hit SDP edit>view AOIP SDP, and copy this to your notepad as well. Now, back to VSC, click the first grey box under ravenna/aoip receiving on the left side, go to add stream SDP in the popup, and paste the SDP into the text box. You should now have active streams in both directions.

You can do a quick test by first, adding those ports to a panel. You can add them to a PL or point to point. By hitting the generator button in VSC, you will send a second of 1k tone on the streaming side of VSC and should hear it on your panel. For testing the listening side of VSC, in windows, go into control panel>sounds>recording. When you talk on the talker port, you should see bouncing levels under R3lay WDM driver 1.

While we’re here, I recommend disabling all WDM drivers, on both the playback and recording side, that you’re not using. That goes for both extra R3lay drivers, internal speakers, or microphones on your PC. Programs will sometimes play out on the wrong device, and limiting the amount of devices available will solve that problem.

Teams/Zoom Settings

Now we should have the ability to talk to the PC, and hear audio from the PC, either on a point to point key or a PL. Our last step is adding those devices as your “microphone” and “speaker” in teams, zoom, skype, whatever. Because VSC uses WDM, compatibility shouldn’t be a problem. Here’s what my teams audio device settings look like

I would avoid settings like auto mic sensitivity, noise suppression, etc, as I’ve seen them cause some problems. These are designed to fix issues on your average mic setup, but don’t perform as expected with this setup. I would also turn off notification sounds, as the WDM driver is now handling all of your Windows Audio, so alerts and such will come through. Setting up zoom, or any other program, is as simple as selecting those WDM Devices. You can even use this to just play music down a PL or IFB for testing purposes.

Troubleshooting Tips

As mentioned previously, making sure that PTP works is your number 1 priority.

• Make sure your domain and announce settings are correct and seen by Lawo VSC.

I’ve had no issues using the E-IPA card as VSC’s PTP GM. You can see those settings here in VSC under diagnostics>Sync.

Also in diagnostics, you can see packet counts for send and receive streams. If you see 0s under bytes received, or large packet losses, that would indicate a network problem.

Additionally, any change you make on the settings menu in VSC requires a stop and start of the VSC service, seen at the top here, the blue stop button next to R3lay VSC. This is also a reasonable troubleshooting step if you are experiencing unusual behavior.