Transferring audio and MIDI over a local network using NetJACK between 2x PC Win10, Win11 and MacBook 🎶💻

[Yulian-M]

Hello! 👋
First of all, I want to express my deep gratitude to all the developers for their many years of work in creating and improving such a powerful software as JACK, and also for making it available to everyone! 🙌✨

I have a few questions regarding the use of JACK for routing audio over a local network between Windows and Mac.

In our church setup, there are three main nodes:

1. 🖥 PC Intel Core i3 Win 10:

• Launching slides to the projector 🎥
• Launching playbacks to the mixing console 🎛️
• Processing audio from the mixing console (received from the AUX outputs of the mixer to channels 1 and 2 of the Behringer UMC204HD audio interface) and sending processed audio to the MacBook via SonoBus for video broadcasting 🎧.

2. 💻 Laptop Lenovo Intel Core i5 Win 11:

• Launching live playbacks by musicians on stage and transmitting to PC1 via ODEUS Asio LinkPro over LAN 🎶📡.
• Transmitting MIDI control signals for slide switching via rtpMIDI by Tobias Erichsen over LAN 🎚️.

3. 💻 MacBook Pro Intel i5 Ventura 13:

• Launching video broadcast to YouTube via OBS 📹.
• Receiving audio from PC1 via SonoBus 🔊.

All computers are connected to LAN by Ethernet via TP-Link TL-WR841 router 🌐.

At the moment, I am considering the option of transferring the audio processing task from PC1 to Mac, but in this case I will have to send playbacks from PC1 directly to Mac. This is necessary so that the sound gets to the broadcast in stereo and without loss of quality, and is also transmitted to the mixing console via the outputs of the Behringer UMC204HD audio interface 🎧➡️🎤.

I would like to replace the ODEUS Asio LinkPro and rtpMIDI to connect all three computers using Jack for local audio and MIDI transferring 🎶⚙️.

Problem: Mac does not see the client's audio inputs and outputs when I start the master server via the jack_load netmanager command in the terminal, and on the client (Windows 10 PC) with the jackd -d net command in CMD 🖥️.

Although the terminal shows that the connection is established (the name of the remote PC is visible), the Graph window on the master (Mac) side does not display the inputs and outputs from the PC.
I managed to get MIDI I/O from a remote PC on a Mac a few times, but even that was unstable 🎹.

❓ Questions:
1️⃣ How can I set up the connection so that it works stably?
How do I set up the master and client for my tasks? 🔧

2️⃣ Is it possible to manually set up Sample Rate, Buffer Size and select a specific audio driver when working with netmanager? 🎚️
In QJackCtl, when selecting the "net" driver, these settings become inactive.
Why does this happen? 🤔

I would appreciate any help, suggestions and answers to my questions. It would also be great if you shared your experience in similar tasks! 💬🙏