[LAU] Value of low-latency in audio?

[Peter Nelson]

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 22:31 -1000, david wrote:
> Just wondering. Without an RT kernel here, my 2 laptops seem to run my 
> simple audio needs pretty well at 64msec latency. At least, it's never 
> bothered my playing along with computer-generated audio.
> 
> I don't do any heavy-duty audio work here. Once I tried Jackrack, put 
> one effect in it (that worked) or one amplifer (that worked) but trying 
> to use both didn't. But I don't know if that had so much to do with 
> latency or lack of RT kernel as with a smallish amount of memory and an 
> underpowered processor driving the whole thing. Now that I''ve upgraded 
> the memory on both laptops, perhaps it would work? On musicbox, with 
> 512MB, using a single good quality (larger) soundfont was enough to 
> cause problems. With 768MB in it, it works without problems.
> 
> I see people on the list running much lower latencies than 64msec, and 
> seemingly trying to get even lower ...
> 
> So, just wondering.

If you are doing anything with live audio such as effect processing or
synthesis from MIDI input, you will probably want sub-20ms latency.

If you are just recording then higher latency may be prefered to reduce
CPU load and the risk of xruns.