ChairRoulette ! Multiple audio input and output

Hi everybody,

For a non profit event in Marseille (france), I want to do a project inspired by the website “chatroulette.com”, but in real world. The idea is to have 10 beach chairs, equiped whith microphone and speaker, and a “next” button. When a person seat on it, and press the button “next”, It will start a communication with another chair, selected randomly. If the person press the “next” button again, it will switch to another chair.

(I will also add a sensor to detect the presence of a person on the chairs, to avoid comunication with empty chair)

Il plan to use radio helmet with integrated microphone and speaker + radio button (connected to an arduino). So all the communications between chairs could be managed with v4.

My questions are :

  • How can I have 10 microphones input connected to v4, Hardaware ? And v4 compatiblity ?
  • How can I have 10 audio outputs (dont need stereo) ?
  • I guess it will be then possible to link input and output with v4, but do you see any problems I could face?

Thanks by advance for your advices,
Rogerlette

this sounds like the perfect job for the MatrixMixer node from the audio pack.

the more challenging question is indeed how to get all the audio channels in and out of the computer. you would need a soundcard with 10 inputs, 10 outputs and ASIO driver to work with the audio pack. then you need 10 microphone pre-amplifiers for the headsets and 10 hadphone amplifiers. there might be standard headset amplifiers available which do both…

if you reduce the amount of channels to 8 there are a lot of cheap options. for 10 channels there might be the Traktor Scratch A10 which is small but has no microphone pre-amps. the Roland UA-1610 looks like a more professional sound card and has 10 microphone pre-amps for normal microphones but is quite big…

I think http://jackaudio.org/ + asio4all will let you route multiple audio interfaces from/to vvvv

Bit of a pig to set up though

Thanks Tebjan and MrBoni for you reply,

Tebjan, which device are you thinking about when you say “if you reduce the amount of channels to 8 there are a lot of cheap options” ?

Could you explain me more into details what I’ll have to do to connect for example “Traktor Scratch A10” inputs and outputs to v4 ? Should I just install some drivers (ASIO) and directly play with some node in the audio pack? Is more complicated and what is exactly Jackaudio used for?

maybe the Tascam 16x08 usb, it has 8 microphone pre-amps…

quote:
install some drivers (ASIO) and directly play with some node in the audio pack?

yes, its as easy as that…

JackAudio appears in vvvv as ASIO driver. you can configure the number of channels it should have and route these channels freely to/from any amount of physical sound cards. this would potentially allow you to use 10 super cheap 3 Euro usb-stick style sound cards. but you have to find out which usb-stick model works with Jack and if they work with multiple devices connected to one pc.