Virscient partners with CME Pro to launch first LiveOnAir wireless audio system.
Embedded software developer Virscient and CME Pro, the creator of wireless MIDI (WIDI) for electronic music creators, have collaborated on the first product to feature Virscient's LiveOnAir technology. LiveOnAir is an ultra-low-latency audio transmission protocol for professional performance audio and hard-core gaming.
The technology combines a flexible ultra-low-latency wireless audio protocol with a suite of codecs that can operate on a regular SoCs, such as the wireless microphone reference design implemented on Nordic Semiconductor's nRF5340 BLE SoC, running both the protocol stack and codecs. LiveOnAir leverages the nRF5340 dual-core architecture, deploying the optimized low-layer protocol stack on the network processor and the codecs (with as low as 1.5-ms algorithmic latency) and upper application layers on the application processor.
Targeting any application that uses a microphone to pick up and transmit live audio, its adoption by CME Pro will enable music creators already using a WIDI controller to blend inputs from different instruments for a cleaner, more realistic result. Features include an integrated USB interface to facilitate device firmware updates and USB audio transfer, and I2S/I2C interfaces for flexible connectivity to an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and/or digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for high-quality audio reproduction.
An Army veteran, Alix Paultre was a signals intelligence soldier on the East/West German border in the early ‘80s, and eventually wound up helping launch and run a publication on consumer electronics for the U.S. military stationed in Europe. Alix first began in this industry in 1998 at Electronic Products magazine, and since then has worked for a variety of publications, most recently as Editor-in-Chief of Power Systems Design.
