Implementation of PC Application for Controlling RT-AG External Sound Card

Digital audio systems have developed rapidly and significantly over the last four decades. Beginning with systems that could process one audio channel at 32kHz/13-bit resolution to today's systems such as AV receivers and sound bars which are capable of reproducing more than 15 audio channels at 192kHz/32-bit resolutions. Problems that audio engineers are facing during development and testing phases of these systems are delivering high quality multi-channel signals from PC to audio systems and vice versa - recording 15-channel outputs at high sample rates. PC's sound card is most often not capable of neither delivering nor recording these kind of audio signals. In practice, audio engineers use external sound cards with features that enable them to play and record such complex audio. RT-RK R&D Institute has developed an external sound card for these purposes named RT-AG (RT-Audio Grabber). In this paper, we represent the implementation of PC application that is used for controlling this sound card. Since PC and RT-AG can be interconnected by either Ethernet or USB, the focus is on implementation of Ethernet part of application. This study continues to a paper “The technical solution of the software architecture of RT-AG digital grabber/player device” published at ETRAN 2017 conference.