Plug a Roland REAC stagebox into Linux, and it is ready.

FreeREAC reverse-engineered Roland's REAC — the proprietary Layer-2 protocol (EtherType 0x8819) Roland's digital mixers use to carry many channels of audio to their stageboxes over one Ethernet cable — and proved the result on real hardware: an M-200 driving REAC at 44.1 and 48 kHz, an M-5000 at 96 kHz, and S-1608, S-4000S and S-0808 stageboxes on the other end. Head-amp control — gain, phantom power, pad — travels on the wire itself, a Linux box can take either the master or the slave role, and a segment can run over a tagged VLAN trunk rather than a dedicated cable.

Three pieces. libreac (the protocol: frame codec, control block, head-amp records, box identity, master/slave state machines) and libreac-transport (built from the same repository: AF_PACKET sockets, the real-time pacer that clocks the wire, VLAN sub-interface handling) carry no opinion about audio APIs. reac-pw links both and puts a stagebox on a Linux PipeWire graph as source and sink nodes — no bridge, no second encapsulation. reac-stageboxes is a GTK4/libadwaita desktop app that sets phantom power, pad and sensitivity on every input of every box on the graph, through reac-pw's own node parameters.

• libreac — the REAC protocol and its transport, libreac-transport, one repository and one release.
• reac-pw — the PipeWire-native REAC endpoint; runs as master or as slave.
• reac-stageboxes — the desktop app for the preamps.
• reac-protocol — the wire-format reference every repository above is verified against.

Also in the organisation: reac-tools (capture analysis — loss, reordering, jitter, head-amp record parsing) and reac-captures (a CC0 public-domain corpus of address-sanitised capture fixtures).

Fedora 44:

sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://freereac.github.io/rpm/freereac.repo
sudo rpm --import https://freereac.github.io/rpm/RPM-GPG-KEY-freereac
sudo dnf install reac-pw

GPL-3.0-or-later, every repository.

FreeREAC is an independent interoperability project, not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Roland. REAC is a trademark of Roland Corporation, used here only to identify the protocol. No Roland firmware, binaries, symbols or decompilation listings are redistributed; everything published is FreeREAC's own re-expression of behaviour observed on its own equipment.

More at freereac.github.io/freereac-www.