Tethering zynthians

In a effort to decouple front end implementation form enjin’ would it be useful to add an ability to tether a zynthian front end on one machine to a differing back end on another machine?

In my simple world this would allow me to control my hifiberry-amp zynthian from my ‘standard zynthian’, thus keeping the speaker machine located near the speakers and the communication channel back to the ‘mixing’ head being cabled or even wireless IP?

Anyone think that would be useful?

1 Like

What you want is a better OSC support? @jofemodo?

1 Like

It’s about killing of needless wiring between boxes. I don’t really care if the sound I hear comes out of a zynthian located close to me or one over near a mixing console but I do like the idea of not having to run audio cables to my control surface. I’ve played around with xwindows but it was the observation that the display layout is already optomized for the device it runs on that prompted the though that a couple of additions to the admin page might make it an operator intuitive and allow you to tun ethernet cat 5 to the controller on the keyboard rack.

If I would design sth new, i would open a Websocket connection and let a webpage handle it.

For making this possible, we must design a low level OSC protocol for the zynthian UI. It’s in the “wish list” and @C0d3man has been making some work in the zyncoder library, but it’s not ready yet.

Once the OSC-UI is ready, we could conceive different interfaces for remote control the Zynthian:

  • Dedicated android/IOS app that would send/receive the OSC commands and display the Zynthian UI.
  • WebApp, served from the Zynthian Box, that would use websockets to tunnel the OSC data-flow.
  • Using a Zynthian Box for controlling other Zynthian Boxes. A kind of “master of puppets” :wink:

Of course, using the XWindows or VNC for remotely run the zynthian UI is perfectly possible. In fact, there is a Web-VNC client that use websockets. I’ve tried and it works … but it’s not very comfortable and it’s difficult to setup for “normal” people.

Anyway, if you want to explore this way, go forward with it … and document the process!! :wink:

Regards,

1 Like