Why can't I see my Dante devices in Dante Controller?
Discovery runs on multicast, so this is almost always a network problem wearing a gear costume. In order of likelihood:
IGMP snooping misconfigured on one of the switches — the most common culprit by a wide margin. VLAN mismatch: mDNS doesn't cross VLANs, so if your laptop landed on the office VLAN while the stageboxes live on the Dante VLAN, you're invisible to each other. Link-local limbo: a device stuck on a 169.254.x.x address never got a DHCP lease. Isolation: Wi-Fi client isolation, a VPN, or a dual-homed machine quietly pulling your controller off the network you meant to be on.
The fix starts with knowing which of those it is — which is what the subnet scan and isolation check are for.
Why does my Dante audio drop out randomly — clicks and pops?
Clicks and pops are almost always a clocking problem, not a bandwidth problem. Two devices both convinced they're the leader. A console synced to internal while its Dante card expects external (or the reverse). A sample rate mismatch nobody noticed until the second act. Or PTP traffic not surviving the switch fabric because flow control, QoS, or spanning-tree settings were left at factory defaults.
The annoying part: it usually sounds fine until it isn't. The diagnostics log timestamps precisely so you can correlate the dropouts with what changed.
Why is my Yamaha console fighting me on clocking?
CL/QL desks ship with opinions. They default to internal clock, and the Console ID situation doesn't always line up with what Dante Controller shows you. The result is the classic intermittent click instead of a clean, obvious failure — the worst kind of problem to chase during changeover.
The walkthrough covers the defaults, the IDs, and which box should be telling whom what time it is.
Can primary and secondary Dante networks share one switch?
No. We get why it's tempting — one switch, two VLANs, half the hardware budget. But primary and secondary exist so a single point of failure can't take down both paths. Share a switch and one IGMP misconfiguration takes out primary and secondary simultaneously, ideally mid-show.
This scenario has its own guided walkthrough, because someone will try it anyway.
Why don't my d&b amps show up on the Dante network?
With a DS100-based system, amplifiers behind the failsafe/monitoring layer can be perfectly healthy and still never appear as Dante endpoints. The DS100's status LEDs are the source of truth there, and they tell a different story than Dante Controller does.
If you didn't know that, you've probably replaced an amp that was fine. It's okay. It happens to everyone once.
Do I still need Dante Controller if I have Dante Troubleshooter?
Yes — and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Dante Controller is free, it's excellent at routing, and nothing else shows you live clock status the way it does.
Dante Troubleshooter picks up where it stops: full subnet scans in seconds, honest ping and UDP probes, isolation checks, subnet comparison, guided fixes that explain the why, and the manufacturer quirks that never make it into the manual. Route with Controller. Diagnose with us.
Six failure modes, forty-eight screens, and the field knowledge to back them up. Doors are in 40 minutes.