REAC stageboxes

openmixer can take its inputs straight off a Roland REAC stagebox and send its outputs back to the box, with no converter box and no audio-over-IP layer in between. The transport is handled by reac-pw, a separate daemon the mixer starts and configures for you.

This section is what an operator needs to cable, configure and trust the link. It does not describe the protocol internals — you do not need them, and they are not documented here.

• Supported boxes — which models work, how many inputs and outputs each gives you, and how you tell the mixer which one is on the wire.
• Wiring and the network interface — the single-master rule, what to plug where, and the NIC requirements. Read this before cabling. The wrong interface produces audio that sounds broken in a way that looks like a decoding bug.
• Clocking and sample rate — who is master, what rate the box runs at, and why a mismatched graph rate makes a stagebox sound granular.

How it fits together

stagebox  ──(REAC, raw Ethernet)──  NIC  ──  reac-pw  ──  PipeWire  ──  openmixer

• reac-pw owns the wire. It runs as the systemd user unit reac-pw.service and presents the box to the rest of the system as two ordinary PipeWire nodes: reac-capture (the box's inputs) and reac-playback (the box's outputs).
• openmixer sees those nodes exactly as it sees a sound card. You patch them to channels in the Patchbay like anything else.
• Head-amp control — phantom power, pad, input sensitivity — travels over the same link. See head-amp control in the operator manual.

Configuring it

Everything is set from the mixer: Setup → Adapters → REAC. That writes ~/.config/reac-pw/ and enables and starts the transport unit. There is no file to hand-edit for normal use, and nothing about your rig is compiled into any package — the interface names, the box model and the rates are all runtime configuration.

See REAC configuration in the administrator guide for what that file contains.