[LAU] Jack - buffers V periods

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Thu Jan 18 01:04:09 UTC 2018


On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 7:37 PM, Tim <termtech at rogers.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 01/17/2018 06:58 PM, Will Godfrey wrote:
>
>> I'm getting a little confused when comparing our (Jack) buffer sizes with
>> those
>> discussed on Windows, Mac and general music groups.
>>
>> These latter never mention periods at all, and it's always frames per
>> buffer,
>> so when trying to make comparisons should I take buffers as 1:1 or should
>> I be
>> comparing their buffers to our periods?
>>
>>
> Hi Will.
>
> From memory on Windows years ago, and if I understand Jack correctly,
>  Jack, or more specifically ALSA (in this case let's say using the
>  ALSA driver), puts you much lower-level towards the sound hardware.
>

​while true, this is not necessarily a benefit.

the better design here is to completely decouple everything as much as
possible from device interruptsm and use DLL's to provide sub-sample
accurate "prediction" of where an application can read and write at any
time.

this allows you to have multiple applications using different buffer sizes
(different latency), and to get better latency than the device's inherent
interrupt intervals would allow.

it's what coreaudio does, and ALSA should do it too. i doubt if it ever
will. pulse sort of does this, but all in user space.​
​
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