Setting up a dedicated Spectrafoo computer

By Barry Wood, The Other Room

Having been an avid Spectrafoo user for many years I've often dreamt of setting up a separate computer that would be doing nothing but running Spectrafoo. Even with a dual monitor setup I found that I didn't have room for all the meters that I'd like to run and still have space for my DAW windows. The other issue is that as I approached the processing limit of my system, Spectrafoo's display response would naturally suffer.

I was able to set up a system comprised of my main computer (a dual 2.3ghz G5) and the venerable Apple Cube. While the cube isn't the fastest computer around it has enough horsepower to run a screen-full of Spectrafoo instruments. The complete lack of a fan in the Cube is also a bonus in an studio. The Cube's 500mhz G4 processor is also fast enough to display a monitor full of Spectrafoo instruments. I'm sure the Mac Mini would also make a suitable machine for these purposes.

The Goal

I wanted to make this work with a minimum of additional hardware. I didn't want to buy another audio interface for the Cube and have to deal with another digital audio connection and the requisite cabling and clocking issues. For that matter I also didn't really have room for another keyboard and mouse.

I was able to get the Spectrafoo Cube completely operational with the addition of a monitor, an Ethernet cable, and little more than $100 invested in software to make it happen.

Controlling the second computer

I was able to forego an additional keyboard and mouse by using an excellent piece of donationware called Teleport. When you install this software on two Macs that are networked you can temporarily control the keyboard- and mouse-less computer via Ethernet. Since all it's sending over the network is mouse moves and keystrokes it's very responsive.

Getting the audio from point A to point B

Using Wormhole I was able to route audio from Digital Performer over Ethernet to the Cube. Getting the audio out was easy, just put an instance of Wormhole on the master fader in DP. The real trick was getting the audio coming over Ethernet into Spectrafoo on the Cube. This was accomplished using three pieces of inexpensive software: Rax; Soundflower; and Wormhole.

In order to use Wormhole on the Cube I needed an Audio Unit host. Rax is an Audio Unit host that has a very small CPU and memory footprint, the perfect candidate for the job. You simply have to put Wormhole on an insert on the master fader, set it up as and end node, select "play through", and name it appropriately. I took the obvious route and called the Wormhole channel "foo".

Soundflower provided an audio driver that allowed me to get the output of Rax into Spectrafoo. I set up Rax to use the Soundflower (2ch) output and set up Spectrafoo to use the Soundflower (2ch) input.

At this point everything works great and there are no deal-breakers in the form of recurring configuration issues. A DP project with a Wormhole instance will not complain if the Cube isn't running and the Cube doesn't care if there's nobody sending audio to it. To use the system I simply have to hit the glowing button on top of the Cube to wake it up and put Wormhole on the master fader of any audio project to get audio flowing over the to Cube.

Routing from other applications

I had accomplished my main goal of getting the audio routed from DP to the Cube but originally I had hoped to be able to have anything passing through CoreAudio on my main system to be routed to the Cube but that proved to be difficult since Apple is not particularly interested in allowing software to circumvent DRM systems at that low a level.

Our friends at Rogue Amoeba had the solution for getting other applications like PreMasterCD, iTunes, Safari, and the QuickTime Player to route the audio data to Cube with Audio Hijack Pro. The key feature that the Pro version has is the ability to insert AU's. Drop in an instance of Wormhole and Hijack away.

You do have to be a little careful because Wormhole doesn't like to have two instances generating audio on the same named channel so make sure that you don't have your DAW running with Wormhole active when you decided to hijack iTunes.

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I'd like to than B.J. Buchalter and Kelly Jacklin for their input and suggestions in my quest to make this all work.
Barry Wood — Nov, 2005

Updated Sept-08