recording audio to a network drive

[gdgross]

Hi all.  I'm relatively new to setting up networks, although i do have a wired home network now. 

I also have a home recording studio (music) and all my computers are macs running osx. 

I'd like to purchase a NAS drive for a couple purposes: backup yes, but I'd also like to try and record audio to a network drive in realtime.  Then I can work on sessions remotely when I'm not in the studio room itself, or from another computer also.  Typically I record to a USB3 SSD attached to my mac, which is of course a fast interface compared to a network.  I've read of people recording successfully to networked drives, but I confess to not knowing enough about networking to know what I need.  I assume the bottleneck in the data transfer will be the network itself, not the drives or anything like that.  (I can always get SSDs I suppose if drives do end up being the problem.) 

So I'm looking for a NAS drive (maybe like a Synology DS220+ or similar).  I'm thinking two or more drive slots, so I can just by a single SSD (if needed) to use to record to, and a traditional spinning drive for the mirror or additional storage. 

Any thoughts on a home/small office type model that will keep up with fast data transfer while recording audio are welcome. 

The current network is 1G coming from an apple airport extreme.   

Thanks for any thoughts or advice!

[Dieselboy]

Hi and Welcome!

I recommend first you begin with how you're going to achieve the recording (in terms of actually sending the data) and also what format / codec you'll be using as this will determine the bitrate. If you're recording live then you will need a good stable network (ie not wifi) because if there is some lost packets then I doubt you'll be able to recover them. Recovery usually means retransmission of the missing packets, so unless the source is buffering the data then you may not have the lost packets at all to be able to retransmit them. Again if you look at "how" you're going to be sending the data then this might have some inbuilt mechanism for this.

In terms of network I'd expect gigabit Ethernet is way more than capable of doing what you need. Probably a 100M network is sufficient as this would give 1.25mbps max including the overhead. For example, HD video (albeit compressed) uses under 10MB if I recall.

Have you spoke to any decent music shops or places that specialise in high-end audio?

[icecream-guy]

just plug your device to you sound card input  mic, board, or whatever,  then use audio software to capture and export in your favorite audio format,

I have a cassette deck connected to my sound card and use audacity to record the audio, and export.
I have converted many cassettes to MP3 format 320 bit.

[deanwebb]

Agree with Dieselboy about using wired instead of wireless. You want reliability in your voice work, so you need the wire for less possible interference from the environment.

If you map the NAS as a network drive, you can pipe output directly to that drive via most applications. Don't know if there are any that will pipe directly to a network share, but I haven't tested that either...

... looks like it's possible: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=36933

That being said, they make the same cautions about data loss. It may be where you want to record directly to your PC and then have a batch script that copies the files to the NAS once they're recorded. Or copy manually, whichever.

[gdgross]

thanks all - yes, definitely will be using wired.  I already have a tiny 1G network right now, just looking for the right hardware for a network drive that won't add any additional bottlenecks mainly.  (my current "network" is just my computer, cat6 cable under the patio and house to an apple airport extreme.)

I calculated the data throughput at about 18Mbps.  (24 bits x 48kHz x 16 simultaneous channels) not counting any overhead or packets lost or whatever of course.  Seems like maybe even a 100M network could handle that... but I just want to make sure I don't accidentally shoot my idea down via some poorly chose hardware.  If I'm going to spend $300-600 on some NAS i want it to be the right one!

Thanks :-)

[deanwebb]

Hard drive speed on the NAS will be the key, looks like. 18Mbps is nothing for a network, as you noted, but now we're looking at how fast the CPU can handle it, how much memory it has to buffer the writes, and how fast it can commit the writes to the storage solution.

SSD drives look like the best bet.

[gdgross]

Thanks dean, in that case perhaps I should purchase without hard drives, and spring for an SSD on the recording drive at least.  (mirrors or backups could of course be spinning disks....)

[Otanx]

I don't do any audio stuff so maybe I am off base, but are you going to be working with just one stream/file, or are you going to be trying to work with multiples? When you say a recording studio I would think at least two streams when recording? A pickup on the instrument, and a mic? Then when editing you would be merging those together into a single file. 18Mb/s per stream can add up fast. Maybe that is handled before it heads to the NAS?

If you are just handling one (even two) I don't think network or drive speed is the issue. I would think it would be the CPU/RAM of the NAS to handle, and process the traffic. Especially if the protocols you are using with the NAS does any encryption. Then the NAS is going to decrypt, parse, and submit the writes to the drive.

-Otanx

[gdgross]

Thanks Otanx -

TBH, i'm not sure how the recording software parses and packs the data, but I'm guessing it will be as many streams as there are simultaneous channels being recorded?  I do know that when all is said and done, each channel gets it's own wav file associated with the project, but I'm not sure if the software (protools in this case) sends them out individually or as a chunk or what as it's writing to the drive. 

Here's a data flow description though for helping everyone's understanding:

Microphones/inputs -> multiple channel audio interface (converts the audio into bits and talks to the computer) -> single thunderbolt cable -> computer running osx -> storage medium (current: usb 3 SSD; proposed: NAS)

does that help?

[deanwebb]

Going over wired network with 1Gb speed available should be just fine, I would think. Having the SSDs in the PC or NAS would be the fastest recording there, and that's in line with how I see some other people describing their setups.