If enabling wifi instead of rj45

Building Zynthian
1

I’m just sending out the ask here. What would it mean, latency-wise, to start running rtpMidi over wifi vs wired ethernet? (your experiences please).

Background

I’m running a few bare metal boxes of MiniDexed and DreamDexed. Due to various issues (that i think is bugs rather than features - all of them reported to respective repos) i finally got things stabilized on Wifi. While i was expecting dreadful latency, i soon found out that there was no such thing experienced at all. I run rtpMidi + loopMidi to connect and the monitor reports anything between 1-4ms latency (+ its not audible to my ears which is the most important aspect).

So i was thinking about how Zynthian would operate over Wifi and the latency that would come with it. Did anyone test it out and how did you fare?

2

I haven’t run rtpMidi over wifi but I have done it with qmidinet, comparing wifi versus cables., and It’s possible but it’s not reliable. You get occasional gaps and delays, whilst over wires it’s rock solid. Presumably just the contention in the wifi signal paths but it’s not a satisfying experience given the basic requirement of MIDI.

I don’t know if rtpMidi does anything to addresses these inadequacies, QmidiNet is simple udp packets so it’s basically best effort.

Over Ethernet it’s rock solid in my experience, wifi just functional enough to have you always thinking of it whilst you play, which isn’t what you want.