Networking is the Future of Audio Pt. 1 - IP Addresses
If you are a monitor engineer like me, you may be familiar with devices like a Shure PSM1000 or Shure Axient. A common use of basic networking is trying to network them together to talk to Wireless Workbench for coordination, deployment, and control. Far too often, you plug in your Lenovo PC with a USB to ethernet dongle, open WWB, then nothing. Nothing populates and you do not know why. You selected the proper active network port, but still nothing. Next, you go to the rack unit itself and open the network menu to find several words that look like another language…
What is an IP Address? What is a Subnet? What is a gateway? Should I use Automatic/DHCP or Manual?
While I won’t be addressing networking for Shure devices to wireless workbench specifically, the network concepts here will absolutely translate to fixing your WWB network issues.
As we begin to learn about computer networks, there are a few basic concepts that will lay the foundation for building a robust network.
First and foremost, we need to know what an IP address is. An IP address, short for “Internet Protocol Address”, is part of the foundation of computer networks. They look something like this:
192.168.37.64
I know, it looks like someone got too excited with decimal points. In practice, this number is what it says in the name, it is the address of your computer. Much like your home address, the post office needs to know exactly where you live to deliver your mail properly. Computer networks are the same. Each computer has a “mailing address”, known as an IP address, that allows it to receive “digital mail” known as packets. These packets contain all the data you are sending between devices. Ultimately, these packets being sent back and forth properly are how a network functions.
It is important to know that just like with houses, no two addresses on the same network can be the same, or you will have a bad time.
So, can I just make up any IP address?
Not exactly.
There are several rules that should be followed to build a reliable and flexible network, but it is also essential to understand the information held within this string of numbers.
IP addresses are a string of numbers separated into four groups of eight bits. These eight bits are also known as an “octet”. A bit, or “binary digit”, is the most basic unit of information that can be understood by computers. These bits are counted using a base two number system, where any number in our base ten system can be represented using ones and zeros. This part is tedious, but bear with me. It is important to understand when we get into the next part.
Instead of each number in each number place value (ones, tens, hundreds, etc.) being able to represent 0-9, each number can only represent 0 or 1. Every time you count to one, you move it over one place value and keep going.
For example, counting to 10 in binary would look like this:
1 = 0001
2 = 0010
3 = 0011
4 = 0100
5 = 0101
6 = 0110
7 = 0111
8 = 1000
9 = 1001
10 = 1010
It is ok if this takes a minute to grasp this concept. However, I think it is vital to understand that when it comes to anything involving a computer, at the end of the day, all computers understands are 1s and 0s. All the clicking, typing, and touch gestures are all distilled down into binary. This notion of audio being translated into binary is generally an argument of why most people think analog sounds better. How in the world are you supposed to get the sound of a pushed tube compressor with just a 1 or a 0…?
I digress. So now lets convert the above IP address into binary:
192.168.37.64 in binary would be 11000000.10101000.00100101.01000000
You may notice that since we are limited to eight bits in each octet, the highest number we can create is 11111111 which, in base ten, is equal to 255. Therefore, our range of IP addresses can theoretically be 0.0.0.0 all the way to 255.255.255.255. While that may not seem like that many since they are broken down into four fairly digestible chunks of 0 to 255, there are a total of 4,294,967,296 unique IP addresses. This means you could theoretically have four billion unique consoles, record computers, playback machines, RF devices, and Dante IO devices all on one network. Good luck with that input list.
So which ones can I use?
For our purposes here, we will reference what is known as RFC1918. These are a set of IP addresses that some really smart people set aside for people like you and me to use freely for our devices on a network without interfering with the broader internet address system. The options for IP addresses on a local network we have are:
10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255
While this may not seem like a lot on the surface, this is actually almost eighteen million unique IP addresses at our disposal we can use on our local networks.
Great. I don’t need that many. So, now what?
Now we dive into starting to categorize those IP addresses using what are called subnets…
