A System Supporting Flexible Distributed Real-Time Music Processing

Local-area networks offer a means to interconnect personal computers to achieve more processing, input, and output for music and multimedia performances. The distributed, realtime object system, Aura, offers a carefully designed architecture for distributed real-time processing. In contrast to streaming audio or MIDI-over-LAN systems, Aura offers a general real-time message system capable of transporting audio, MIDI, or any other data between objects, regardless of whether objects are located in the same process or on different machines. Measurements of audio synthesis and transmission to another computer demonstrate about 20ms of latency. Practical experience with protocols, system timing, scheduling, and synchronization are discussed.