XO Wave: Advanced Installation Guide

This guide describes some alternative installation scenarios. For example, you might install the Audio Engine (AE) and GUI on separate machines, or you could install the software in a different directory. Furthermore, this section will help you eke a little additional performance out of your system if you are running the GUI on Solaris, Windows, or Linux. The instructions here assume you have solid experience with administration of your systems, such as text file editing and directory structure, and that you already have a working XO Wave installation on your system. If you don't have XO Wave installed on your system already, please see the Basic Installation Guide.

Moving the Installation to Another Location

Mac OS X: On Mac OS X, XO Wave.app normally resides in /Applications. It should run unaffected from any other location, such as ~/Applications, if preferred.

Linux: By default, XO Wave Free installs in /usr/local/xowave. Many system administrators have a preferred location for software installations, which may not be /usr/local. In general, the locations of XO Wave components are not important, so long as each component can find the others. In the instructions below, all files are referred to by their original locations. Note that once you have moved the files, automatic upgrades and deinstallations are no longer available -- they must be performed manually -- and support will be complicated somewhat by the non-standard configuration.

/usr/local/xowave/bin/xowave

This is the file used to start XO Wave. You may move it wherever you want. If you move the other files, however, you must manually edit this file so that XO Wave will be correctly started. It is a simple file, but editing it requires knowledge of shells and basic Unix command structure.

Java

The Java executable should either be in your PATH or specified in your /usr/local/xowave/bin/xowave file.

/usr/local/xowave/xowave.jar

This file can also be moved to any location, however, /usr/local/xowave/bin/xowave must be edited to reflect its new location.

/usr/local/xowave/bin/XOmux

This file can be moved anywhere, but its location must be specified on the command line to xowave.jar. To do this, edit /usr/local/xowave/bin/xowave to indicate the new location of XOmux. As an alternative, you may install the program in your executable PATH and remove the XOmux from /usr/local/xowave/bin/.

/usr/local/xowave/bin/XOengine*

These files can reside anywhere, but if you move them, they should be moved together. You can either put them in a directory that is in your PATH or manually specify their location in the GUI. To do this, from the XO Wave console, go to the Preferences window and select Show Advanced Settings. Then select the Server tab and enter the absolute path to the directory that contains XOengine in the XOengine Path field. You should then click Okay and check that the settings worked. Note that this setting is a per-user setting, so you may need to repeat this procedure for each user on your system.

Libraries

Libraries needed by XO Wave should either be in your Library Path or in their original /usr/local/xowave/lib/ location.

Running the GUI and Audio Engine on Separate Machines

The exact procedure for running the GUI and Audio Engine on separate machines varies depending on the operating systems involved and the desired results. Using two machines might be desirable for a number of reasons, such as taking advantage of additional processing resources, using a quieter machine in your studio and a louder, more powerful machine in your machine room, and so on. Note that the GUI runs on a wide variety of operating systems and environments, including Microsoft Windows XP. An overview is given here that should suffice for experienced system administrators and computer enthusiasts, but may be challenging for some users.

Setting up File Sharing

This is often the most challenging step. Unfortunately, since it varies so much between operating systems and protocols, it's also particularly hard to document. You may use NFS, Samba, AppleTalk, WebDAV, or any other file sharing system as long as both the client and server have read and write access to the session files. If possible, you will want the files to have the same path on both machines, as this makes things simpler, but is not necessary.

Starting the Audio Engine

Since the Audio Engine and GUI are not on the same machine, the GUI will not be able to start the Audio Engine automatically. On the machine to run the Audio Engine, you will need to run the command /usr/local/xowave/bin/XOmux. Authentication is not by IP address. Instead, XOmux generates a 25-character cookie, which must be known by the client to connect. If you start XOmux without any command-line arguments, the cookie will be displayed on screen and you can copy and paste it into the GUI (XOgui will ask for the cookie when it needs it).
To run XOmux on the remote machine, you will need to start it manually, either at the XOmux computer itself or remotely (possibly with something like ssh AudioEngineHost /usr/local/xowave/bin/XOmux from the XOgui computer). Note that XOmux runs in the foreground (not as a daemon) when launched manually: you must keep the window open to keep the server running. You may type Control-C when done. It is best to quit the XOgui first, though, so XOengine has a chance to exit properly and finish processing.

Configuring the GUI

Once the Audio Engine is running, configure the XOgui to find the server and, if necessary, properly translate the pathnames of the files in the session. To do so, select Audio Engine:Advanced Settings... in the GUI. Deselect Automatically manage local server to reveal the advanced settings, and configure them to reflect your environment.

The Advanced Audio Engine Settings fields have the following meanings:

• The Replace Separator option allows you to replace a character used on one OS to separate directories with the separator character used on another OS.
  For instance, if your GUI is running on a Windows machine and your Audio Engine is running on a Linux system, you would set the first separator to '\' and the second to '/'.
  Usually these are set automatically.
• The filesystem prefixes can be specified similarly. For example, if the system running the GUI mounts the Audio Engine machine's /home as /Volumes/home, then set local prefix to /Volumes/home and remote prefix to /home.
• Host should be set to either the hostname or IP address of the computer with the Audio Engine.
• If you have trouble with metering, you may need to explicitly set the return host under Connect back to:. This is normally unnecessary.

XO Wave Pro users: Note that Pro features are associated with the Audio Engine machine, not the GUI machine.

Improving Video Performance

If you are using a system for which a JMF performance pack is available, and which does not use QuickTime, you may be able to improve the performance of synchronized videos by installing the performance pack. Once you have done so, you will have to modify your /usr/local/xowave/bin/xowave file so that it uses /usr/local/xowave/xowave-nojmf.jar instead of the default /usr/local/xowave/xowave.jar. Make sure that the appropriate performance pack jars are in your CLASSPATH, or specified at the java command line within /usr/local/xowave/bin/xowave.