If you use sACN and haven’t yet learned of Wayne Howell’s Mullticaster software- you are in for a treat.
Have you had confusion over what the many settings in your network switch do and how to set them for good operation? Have you ever had trouble with your sACN network and lost time and sanity trying to figure out what is going on? Have you wanted to test your network to see if there are problems BEFORE they happen? Thanks to Multicaster 2- you now can now test any network setup to see if it is ready for your sACN traffic.
Multicaster 2 is a free-to-use PC-based program you can use to test your network settings for sACN function. It will tell you if it works and stress test how many universes your network can handle. It will not tell you WHAT is wrong if there is a problem, but it will at least tell you that something isn’t right. All you need is two network adapters (one for outgoing traffic, one for incoming traffic), and to download the software onto your windows machine. I’m currently using it on both Windows 10 and 11 and it works fine.
Not only is the software free, there are three articles about sACN and network settings that are on the same page for download, reading, and studying. These three articles are brilliant and very helpful for new and experienced users alike. It walks you through things you need to know about how sACN functions and shows you examples of settings in a network switch you would need to implement. Since all of the interfaces for network switches are different, there will need to be some interpretation involved as well as some experimentation. But at least it’s a place to start, and you then have a tool to test and see if you were successful.
In conclusion, there is no reason not to take advantage of these great resources. I have found them very helpful and I would go so far as to say Multicaster 2 is the missing tech we’ve needed to take some of the mystery out of show networking. Big ups and so much appreciation to Wayne for sharing his hard work with all of us.