Good morning, here’s a story about my butthole. Years ago, it was itching constantly, and I couldn’t figure out why. I assumed it was dirty, so when I went to the bathroom, I always made sure to wipe extra hard. Finally a doctor had to tell me to stop that, and give my butthole a break. I did, and I stopped itching. I tell you this humiliating story for a good reason: according to Mental Floss, a lot of you are wiping too hard as well.
Behold! My lovely, shiny, 32 in, 32 out Tascam ML-32D Dante audio interface.
That’s right, Dante, the amazing tech from Audinate that lets you send a gazillion streams of audio everywhere over plain old Cat5e or above cable. Dante will help!
Annoyed that Thunderbolt leads seem to have a maximum length of 2cm? DANTE!
Worried your USB extension is gonna come loose when the pigeons in your loft find it? DANTE!
It’s the one-stop solution to all your audio networking worries.
In theory…
I got my ML-32D yesterday morning. I hooked it up, booted my iMac Pro, fired up Dante Virtual Soundcard (DVS), which is how your computer talks to a Dante network in the absence of dedicated hardware like a PCIe card, and beamed like a happy child at the screen.
But there was a RED BOX in Dante Controller (how you configure said network). The red box indicated the iMac Pro was not syncing with the ML-32D clock. Hmm, must be something simple, I thought… everything else is green, all the bits are being recognised.
So I tried swapping cables.
Then I tried swapping switches. Went from a Netgear to an Asus and then to switch-free, a direct connection from iMac Pro to ML32D.
Nope. Red box. Sync error.
I got in touch with Audinate customer support who were both extremely prompt and very helpful. I followed their suggestion and installed an older version of DVS.
Nope. Red box. Sync error.
From 9.30am until 1.30am this morning (well, with a couple of breaks to eat and have a little cry), I installed, un-installed, swapped cables and rebooted, rebooted, rebooted. All for naught.
Finally, I solved it. It’s all working perfectly now.
The fix: out of sheer desperation, I plugged in a Thunderbolt 3 (USBC) -> Thunderbolt 1/2 (old square socket) adaptor. Then I plugged in a Thunderbolt -> Ethernet adaptor. To create this Frankenkludge:
And it suddenly all just worked! It’s been working perfectly since. I haven’t changed any other settings, I’ve gone back to the original cables and switch I was using at the start, all fine.
So, DVS *does not* like the built-in Ethernet port on the iMac Pro. I don’t why, but that’s the root of the problem.
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