[Jack-Devel] alsa_in/out increasing time between record and play on second card

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 04/12/2016 10:42 AM, mdrslmr wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we are running a system with two sound cards. The second sound card is
> attached to the jackd2 daemon using jack_load audioadapter.

Just for the record, I'm not familiar with audioadapter. I'm using 
zita-ajbridge, and it works very well.

> We use a script starting:
>
> aplay -q -D $channel Test-Ton.wav &
> arecord -q -D $channel -f S16_LE -r 48000 -c 1 -d 8 $result/recorded.wav

Why are you using alsa tools when you are otherwise working with JACK? 
This will make the problem analysis more complicated...

> The resulting wav file shows that the time between the start of the
> recording
> and the start of the actual sound continuously increases.
> In the beginning (after starting the system up) the time difference is
> just about 3ms. It increases
> constantly to almost one second now
> after 8 weeks of uptime.

If audioadapter works by just providing a big buffer (without any 
resampling), the reason would be clock drift. Such a minuscule clock 
drift between two consumer cards however would be sensationally good.

> This happens most significantly on the channels of the second sound card
> included by jack_load audioadapter and not noticeable on the first sound
> card.

To be expected.

> The invocation of jackd and jack_load is shown below:
> jackd -R -P59 -p 256 -d alsa --device hw:${CARDNUM_0},0 -p 512 --nperiods 3
> jack_load -i "-i4 -o4 -q1 -C5 -p512 -n3 -r48000  -d hw:${CARDNUM_1},0"\
>                                  jackadapter audioadapter
>
> jackd2 version is: 1.9.8~dfsg.4+20120529git007cdc37-5
>
>
> I'm, not sure if we a consistent set of options for jackd and
> audioadapter.
>
> Do you have a suggestion how we can set things up to prevent the
> increase in time difference between recording and playback?

First of all, consider if you can actually sync the cards. If both have 
an SPDIF i/o, you can use that. Just connect the secondary card's SPDIF 
in to the master's SPDIF out (no matter whether you use toslink or RCA), 
and you can be sure your cards will be locked.

Secondly, try zita-ajbridge. If you can sync the cards in hardware, 
there is an option for zita-ajbridge to skip the resampling, which will 
conserve cpu power.

All best,


Jörn




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Jörn Nettingsmeier
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