A little back-story that may be interesting.
In January 2014, I emailed a suggestion to Audinate stating:
You have the Dante Virtual Soundcard system host software, but have you
thought about producing Dante client software that would allow a computer
with one or more existing Firewire/USB/PCIe sound devices, each with their
own ASIO drivers, to be unified and controlled by Dante?The client could even run on the Dante host system, integrating its legacy
devices.I suspect you are looking at your clients as being the ‘big’ operators, and
most of your licencees are only producing devices with large I/O arsenals.However, there is a huge small operator market from the
home/bedroom/hobby/small studio sector that could be on Dante NOW, and
while keeping their current devices, just expand as their requirements ments
grow. This is what AoIP promises.Many of these people are frustrated that they cannot expand their current
I/O capabilities, either on the local machine or remotely, without having to
replace perfectly functioning hardware.
On 24/01/2014, Aidan Williams, the CTO for Audinate, replied:
Thanks for your suggestion! We are always looking to make Dante more widely
used.I’ve passed your email on to our product management and I’m sure it will
help to influence what products and features we work on next.
After I came across Via on 25/06/2014, I replied:
Looks like my idea has become Dante Via?
to which Aidan replied:
As you can imagine, we have been working on Dante Via for long time before the launch last week at Infocommm. Your email (and others like it) gave us confidence that the features we planned to provide in Dante Via would be useful to a wide range of people.
Since Via will not be released until December this year, I have a suspicion that all is not quite the timing Aidan suggests. We are only talking about a Dante protocol wrapper for an ASIO driver here, both of which Audinate have prior experience with, so I would suspect that there would only be a few months for development, if that, and a lot of testing! Do the date maths.
Hmmmm!