[LAU] Value of low-latency in audio?

[david]

Peter Nelson wrote:
> 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.

But I don't want xruns when playing live synthesis from MIDI input, either!

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community