Hiya,

Correct, you need a hardware device to be the clock master. The H9000 Dante board, I am sure, would love to function as the worlds most over qualified Dante clock master.
you could then have any machines on the network use any of the I/o on the H9000. (And not have to use USB…But it’s so easy to USB, I would use that when I could!)

and they can also patch to each other, creating Tie lines as such.  They don’t need to go through the H9000. This is kinda what Dante Via is very useful for.

Food for thought, for sure.

you could do that offloading plug-ins etc.with Dante. It’s perfectly capable of doing that, be aware, it will take some setup.

I have been following a thread of a free product called AudioGridder that seems to have that exact solution rolled out and working very well.

I have not yet used Audio Gridder, But it looks/sounds like exactly what you may want to offload processing. I’d recommend looking at this first. It rolls its own network protocol by the looks of it and I think it gives the gui of the plug-in on the remote machine.   Simple is good, and this is simpler that rolling your own solution. and it’s free??!?

for normal peoples. stop reading here.  Dante slight beginners “Cliff notes” deep dive below the line.

*** not being from the US I hope I referenced Cliff notes correctly there

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So yes, Dante’s flexible and deep…I hope the following is not too much to digest, But it’s<span style=”font-size: inherit;”> not all plain sailing….A little networking understanding helps a lot to troubleshoot.</span>

a few tips if you decide to have a dip of the toe.  Download the Dante controller (free) as well as the other software you want to try out, be that Via or DVS.  Dante controller is the patch manager and the device manager of the Dante devices on the network.  It doesn’t require either of the Dante softwares I mention above to run.

Dante Controller will also be required to change the sample rate of your DVS sound card. (Command D on mac opens up the popup device manager window).  You can’t do it from the DVS window strangely. A lot of devices operate this way.

Really important, and usually fixes most problems…You’ll need the Dante devices to be at the same sample rate and in the same network subnet to be able to control them and patch them together. If you’ve got a used H9000 Dante board, it may have been setup either as a manual IP or as DHCP. Worth looking into that, as this will be the first place to cause trouble.

Most of the time, we are using our studio computer’s network port for internet and local network traffic, usually this network is also connected to a wifi point. Devices are usually assigned an IP address by DHCP from the wifi router.
So then this brings up the question of do we use this network interface, or do we dedicate a new one to it…

If you are not “multicasting” (splitting the outputs to lots of different machines) whilst not officially recommended, in practise you should be fine to start off with using the same network port.
If you start to send lots of traffic, you could pull some network Jedi Layer 3 blocking trickery and stop the switch or wifi router from transmitting the multicasting or simpler still, dedicate a small network switch to the Dante network and use a different Ethernet interface on your computers and the H9000’s Dante board.
This will usually not have a DHCP router active on it, and as such the devices will just self assign in the 169.254.x.x range and still find each other via bonjour.

To begin with, use only the primary network and forget the secondary network.  Whilst it’s great for bulletproof redundancy, just get it working to start with, and consider that if it becomes mission critical.

there’s a lot of details to consider, But once Dante’s setup and running it’s extremely reliable. We’ve been using this in live sound since the Noughties, and after some scary teething, it’s now very very good.
hope this is not tooooo much to digest.

I need an ice cream now after typing this.