[LAD] hard realtime performance synth

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Sat Jan 30 00:20:01 UTC 2010


On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 5:24 PM, David McClanahan
<david.mcclanahan at gmail.com> wrote:
> "KewlSynthOS" ?? No shit. What do you call all these audio distributions
> floating around that basically claim "Plug us in and you'll have an instant
> studio", "Look at our low latency" Blah Blah Blah. How many years has Linux
> been out? And how many years has ALSA and OSS been coupled with it? Since
> we're into "latency", I dare say I'd get less latency if I plugged in a
> 1Mhz  Commodore 64(with 64Kb) and played the SID chip than the latency I've
> gotten from trying to get Linux to give me soft synth on a machine with
> 200Mhz processor and 200+MB of memory.  When this started this a dedicated
> bootup synth what I suggested because quite frankly think its a bit much to
> insure a machine will run reliably as a synth and do spreadsheets at the
> same time. AND I think a lot people would gladly make the tradeoff to have
> an inexpensive reliable instrument especially if they could resurrect an
> older machine for such purposes.
>
> From where I stand, it looks like a LOT of effort has been expended on Linux
> audio systems. It seems to me(forgetting my mission to acheive synth nirvana
> on the Dell for the moment) that it would have been worthwhile to build the
> audio on a hard realtime system since
>
> 1. Correct behavior is dependent upon time deadlines
> 2. That's what hard realtime systems are specifically geared to do.
>
> Anyway, enough.

No, not enough. You still don't seem to grasp that

(a) hard realtime is NOT required for systems doing pro-audio or synthesis
(b) latency matters a lot, but not as much as some people think
(c) doing hard realtime on a general purpose processor on a general
purpose OS is asking for trouble
(d) meeting deadlines these days has more to do with everything in the
box *except* the processor

--p



More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list