I’ve had a few inquiries asking how you could record PLs/Channels on an Eclipse or Arcadia for review, playback, or long term archiving. There are many ways to do this on the Clear-Com side, and many DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) that run on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc for recording. I’m going to show you my preferred way of doing it, and my preferred program because of price and ease of use, but will be touching on a few other ways of doing it.

The Workflow

For this demo, we’re going to use the E-Dante card on an Eclipse, or the Dante NIC of an Arcadia, as our output. We’re going to interface with those ports using Dante Virtual Soundcard (DVS) in ASIO mode, and a program called Reaper as our recording software.

REAPER | Audio Production Without Limits

I like Reaper for this because it natively supports ASIO, it’s easy to use, and focused more at voice recording than music so we don’t need to worry about plugins and insert/track routing that we don’t need. Also, it’s relatively cheap compared to something like Pro Tools, which is way more feature rich than we need for a workflow like this. But, if you’re a music guy and already prefer FL, Logic, etc, any DAW that supports ASIO (which most do) will be fine.

If you’ve worked in audio engineering, you might be asking why not use Audacity? Audacity tends to be the go to recording software on the cheap, because it’s free and quite powerful.

Audacity ® | Free Audio editor, recorder, music making and more!

The reason why we can’t use it here is that it doesn’t support ASIO out of the box. If you’d like to use it, you can record just one channel, using Dante Virtual Soundcard in WDM mode. You can also go through adding ASIO support yourself, which involves compiling the program yourself in Visual Studio. If you’re not a programmer (I’m certainly not), you’re not going to have a good time.

Github for adding ASIO support to Audacity for people comfortable in Visual Studio


For everyone else, Reaper has a 60 day free trial so that you can set it up and try it out, and is pretty cost effective if you decide to buy.

Clear-Com Configuration

For this demo, I’m going to set up recording on 8 PLs. The theoretical limit of this workflow using DVS is 64 channels. All we need to do on our Eclipse or Arcadia is to name Dante ports and add them as listener only ports onto the Partyline/Channel we want to record.

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For my Eclipse here, I have made 8 PLs, and 8 directs on my E-Dante card to go with them, labeled “rec 1, 2” etc. Once these are made, I add each one to a single PL, and make them listener only, or “access: L” by right clicking on it in the attached field. This makes it so the port can only listen on the PL, it can’t talk. This isn’t strictly necessary if you don’t attach the talk side of the Dante port to something, but it’s good practice just in case.

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Very similar in the case of an Arcadia. We go into resources, make 8 Dante ports, and then add them to your channels, one for each.

Dante Configuration

DVS is a widely used application made by Audinate for making a computer into a Dante IO device. It’s a relatively cheap application with a trial period if you want to see this workflow work correctly before paying.

You’ll need DVS and Dante Controller to make this work. Dante Controller is always free.

https://www.getdante.com/products/software-essentials/dante-controller/

https://www.getdante.com/products/software-essentials/dante-virtual-soundcard/

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Once you have both programs installed, we need to configure DVS for ASIO, with the appropriate amount of channels, in this case 8x8, and select the correct NIC for it to talk to the Dante NIC of our Eclipse or Arcadia. All standard best practices related to Dante still apply here, including PTP requirements. If you don’t have a network that can handle Dante reliably, a direct connect from your computer straight to the Eclipse or Arcadia to your recording computer is also a perfectly fine option.

Dante Requirements and Recommendations

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Once we have DVS running and talking to the frame, we should be able to route the transmitters from our frame of choice, to the 8 receivers on our DVS, as shown above. Please note, by default the sample rate will be mismatching between the two devices, to fix that, go to the device config of both by double clicking on them and make sure they’re the same. I chose 44.1k, 48 is also acceptable, as long as your settings in Reaper are correct

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In order to test that you’ve done everything right so far, Dante Controller’s live signal readout in the Device View is a great way to see audio is where you expect it to be. Under the receive tab of your DVS instance (which I called “GregsDVS”), you should see the audio icon turn green when audio is present. So, talk on each PL individually and make sure everything is where you expect before moving forward.

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Reaper Configuration

Our first task in Reaper is audio configuration. Hit Control + P to open preferences, and select settings as shown:

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DVS must be running for it to show up here. Make sure you select RX 1 as first and rx 8 as last (or however large your configuration is). Now, exit, and hit control + t to add a track, one for each individual channel we are recording. Hit the “arm record” button, the red circle on the track, and select the input channel we want to use, as shown below. One track for one channel:

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If you’ve done everything correctly, with all tracks in “armed” mode, you should see bouncing levels corresponding with each channel you’ve attached from the matrix. You can name each track in Reaper, if that makes it easier to follow for you:

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If we see levels as such, we’re good to record our show, mission, etc. The master record button is the red one pointed to here, or with the hotkey control + r, and hit the same button again to stop.

In terms of other settings, I’d call Reaper pretty user friendly purely on the fact that you don’t need to worry about or change any setting and it should work fine with defaults. Sample rate of the project is one thing I’d pay attention to, but it should automatically match the sample rate of your ASIO interface, in this case, DVS.

Exporting From Reaper

Once you’re ready to export your recording from reaper, you can go to File>Render.

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Note that this waveform was me talking on each of my 8 PLs on a panel in sequence

There’s a few settings here in the render menu I want to point out. At the top, Source decides which tracks, or all of them, are going to get mixed down into one file. If you want all of them together, select master mix. If you want only one channel, hit selected tracks as source instead, close out of the render menu, and select the track you want by clicking on them (you can also shift click if you want multiple). You'll then have to repeat the process for each channel you want. You can also set bounds to “entire project” or “selected range”. Selected range lets you export just a certain time period. The last thing I would point to is the format. For maximum compatibility, mp3 is probably your best bet.

Other Questions

Can I listen back to my recordings before exporting them?

Yes, but unfortunately, because of how ASIO works, Reaper will use the same ASIO device for monitoring as it uses for recording, in this case, DVS. DVS is an 8x8 bidirectional audio device, so we can use the input side for this, but it needs to connect to another Dante device. Simple speakers with a Dante Nic (fostex makes a nice one) would work here. But, the easiest way to monitor or preview tracks after a record I’ve found is to reverse this entire signal flow, and use an input port on your Eclipse or Arcadia, and an output from DVS, since we already have these ports available to us.

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Note that as opposed to last time, DVS is the transmitter and my Eclipse Dante card is the receiver. I can then put Dante port 1 as a listen only port on a panel, and listen to it to preview my Reaper Timeline. I’ve yet to find a better way to do this, it’s endemic to the ASIO standard and its timing, that a standard WDM device, ie the speakers on your computer, can’t be used at the same time. There are some programs that can map ASIO to WDM, such as ASIO4All, but I’ve found that it doesn’t work for this particular setup. Your mileage may vary, and if you do get this working, please let me know! Note that you can scrub around on the timeline to go to a specific spot, and you can use the M and S buttons (mute and solo) to listen to the specific track on the timeline you want to hear.

How do I make this work without a Dante interface?

The reason I selected Dante for this workflow is that it’s an extremely efficient way of getting multiple channels, up to 64, into your PC recording software, with the only wire needed being two ethernet cables (or just one with a link local). However, any way we can get audio into our PC is a viable alternative. Here’s a few recommendations for if you’re trying to make this work on an Eclipse without a Dante card, or on something like an HMS.

Dante AVIO


https://www.getdante.com/product/audinate-dante-avio-2-channel-analog-input/

Dante AVIOs are cheap little Dante devices that can be used as a “gateway”, ie analog to Dante interface. With outputs from an MVX, one of these devices can get you two channels of dante transport into your DVS instance. You’ll need to wire your MVX outputs to XLR, as shown in article, we don’t need the input side wired for this specific workflow.

Matrix: How do I breakout audio directly from an Eclipse MVX-16 port to 3-pin XLRs?

Then, just route the outputs of the AVIO (or multiple if you want more than two discrete channels), to the DVS receivers in Dante Controller, just like we did with the E-Dante card shown above.

Station IC and Virtual Audio Cable


https://clear-com.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SF/pages/2747301905

I wrote up this article on using a station-IC instance as a virtual WDM device in windows, for the purpose of getting Teams and Zoom into a frame, but you could also use it for recording. Simply set it up as shown in this article, and set the input to your DAW as the Virtual Audio Cable’s output. This is an especially clean workflow if you only need one channel, or you are ok with all channels being mixed together down to one track. That means, you’ll never be able to export a single PL’s recording as a separate file, as I showed in Reaper. As shown in this article, make your station-IC panel have all the PLs you’d like to record, and click listen on all of them. With this workflow, Audacity would have everything you’d need, and would be free. The only cost would be giving up one of your station-IC licenses to your recording computer, and the price of Virtual Audio Cable. The nice part here is that we have an easy GUI for changing which PLs we’re recording, thanks to Station-IC.

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Pure Analog

It’s certainly possible to make a recording workflow happen with only analog available. Your one challenge will be getting the balanced output that comes off pins 4 and 5 to something that your computer can work with. The quickest way would be to buy one of the easily available cables that can do that for you, or solder your own if you’re comfortable doing that. From there, stick your 3.5mm TRS into your computer’s mic jack, and select it as your record device in audacity. Last, add the MVX port you’ve selected into the PLs you want it to hear, as a listener only just like the Dante version of the workflow above. Remember you can absolutely have 1 port listen to as many PLs as you want.

Final Thoughts

As I’ve shown, while I favor the signal flow of:

Clear-Com Dante Output > DVS > Reaper

You can replace anything in this chain depending on your needs. I built this out specifically for a customer that needed the ability to export recordings of PLs as individual files as well as together as one “master”. If all you need is one channel of recording, either with just one PL or with multiple mixed together, this project gets significantly cheaper and easier.