Integrating ipMIDI, Delta Control, or multiple consoles with existing networks

28 September 2021 13:56

This article describes best practices for integrating ipMIDI, Delta Control, or multiple consoles into existing networks.

The easiest way is to simply connect everything directly to your switch or router and use DHCP addressing. This is standard network practice and is how the majority of networks that you use in the world are done. No special information or network changes are needed when SSL is used in this manner.

For more sophisticated arrangements, consider the following details on how ipMIDI and Delta Control function.

ipMIDI and Delta Control use UDP multicast 225.0.0.37 and 225.0.0.38 respectively.
The Remote app uses unicast and broadcast for console discovery.
If your DAW has more than one network adapter or you are using Wi-Fi, you cannot connect one adapter to the console and the other to your building network and expect the system to work correctly with both adapters active. If you must use this method, you will need to bind ipMIDI and Delta Control multicast to the network adapter connected to your console. See Multiple Network Adapters and IPMIDI
SSL consoles are unable to send IGMP, so if your network has IGMP Snooping enabled, you will need to create a static multicast group to forward traffic with a destination address of 225.0.0.37 and 225.0.0.38 between console and DAW ports. Alternatively you may disable IGMP Snooping on those ports.
If you have multiple consoles in the same facility, you will need to prevent multicast from one studio to another. Failure to do this will result in all the studios controlling each other. You have a few options to deal with this:
1. The easiest non-networking method is to simply assign one to DAW 1 and the other to DAW 2. Route their ipMIDI ports accordingly.
2. Create a VLAN for each studio, then route these VLANs to your facility’s access VLAN, making certain you don’t route multicast with a destination of 225.0.0.37-38 between the VLANs (by default, multicast is not routed between VLANs).
3. Create ACL rules which prevent traffic with a destination of 225.0.0.37 & 225.0.0.38 between devices in different studios.
4. Install SSL’s preconfigured LAN integration switches in each studio. Yes you would need one per console. These switches contain a preconfigured static multicast group on ports 1-6 which will forward ipMIDI and Delta Control between any connected devices. Ports 7 or 8 are blocked from ipMIDI and Delta traffic, but will pass all other network traffic transparently (this is where you connect your LAN).

ipMIDI uses UDP ports 21928 through 21947.