Question / Help recording 32 audio channels

angelofarina

New Member
I have got an Eigenmike 32, a nice microphone array equipped with 32 studio-grade Sennheiser capsules mounted in an 8cm-diameter spherical body. It is great for recording High Order Ambisonics (HOA) and Spatial PCM Sampling (SPS).
I have also got a Ricoh Theta V camera, which can stream an equirecrtangular video at 3840x1920, 29.97fps on USB.
I would like to use OBS Studio MC (the multichannel version by PKV, which can be downloaded here: https://github.com/pkviet/obs-studio ).
However, it appears that it is limited to just mere 16 channels, a very limited channel number in today's audio world, where most audio-over-ethernet interfaces (MADI, AVB, Dante, Ravenna) are capable of 64 channels.
Of course I could download the source code, modify the single line of code where the maximum number of channels is fixed, and recompile.
But wouldn't it be better, instead of creating a further fork from the main project, that the multichannel capabilities are incorporated in the main release of OBS Studio, and raising the maximum number of channels to a "reasonable" number, say 64?
Of course in our labs we run also a "triple MADI" Mac-Pro based system, capable of 192 channels, so really I do not see any reason for not allowing also for such huge channel number. Then, if one need less, he will be able to set the number suitable for him. But why limit the number of channels to the ridiculous number of just 16?
I know that codecs employed for streaming are in some way limited in support for huge channel numbers.
But for RECORDING, we want just to record plain PCM, at, say, 48 kHz, 24bits, or, better, at 96 kHz, 32 bit float. A modern SSD can deal with 64 channels uncompressed also on a laptop, so there is no real hardware constraint.
So please, can true massive multichannel support be added to the main release of OBS Studio, or at least to the current MC fork by PKV?
 
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