The audio stream can go directly to the HAPI if you don't have an Anubis, but then you have to control the volume via the knob on the front panel of the HAPI. I suppose you could do volume conotrol on a PC/Mac though, but I haven't tried it.
Yeah, that's sort of what I was thinking. I write custom web interfaces / integrations for a lot of the things I use to better tie them together. That's actually one of the reasons I find this no nonsense, audio over IP stuff so interesting (the simple packetization & timestamping of audio data is a huge draw as well)
One awesome thing about using a computer as a source without a processor is the ability to use 65,000 tap convolution filters for room correction in the time and frequency domain. No processor in the world can come close to this.
There's just no equal. I completely understand the 'convenience' factor of a dedicated processor but, there's just a hard ceiling on what they can do, they're stuck with very stagnant DSP.
I'd rather have rock solid D/A and handle feeding it on my own.
I do the same with video, it's almost absurd to NOT take advantage of extremely capable GPUs to handle scaling.
Regardless, we've veered quite off topic. I hope they can sort out these performance issues, your system should be more than capable of handling this if it's the one you've outlined previously.