Hey all,

So the continuing saga is this: still no luck getting Pianoteq with JACK to equal or spank with superiority the performance of PianoTeq w/ALSA alone on my system.....

I found the following information: the info from the /proc/asound output that Paul asked me to check out confirmed that at comparable settings, JACK choked where ALSA smoked. I had ALSA down to a period of 64 and 3 periods/buffer (hardware bufsize of 192) at a sample rate of 48000. The same setting of jackd ('jackd -dalsa -dhw:0,0 -r48000 -p64 -n3 -S') didn't agree with Pianoteq....

So...here's my dilemma. I have a live show coming up where I'd prefer to use the superior harpsichord sound of Pianoteq, but I don't want to risk a lock-up or xruns or worse in a live concert. So I would have to use ALSA...BUT....I also need to switch to playing a live kalimba through some Csound effects right after playing a harpsichord, and Pianoteq under ALSA will not stand for another app opening and sharing the soundcard like JACK will allow (ALSA will block I/O).

So what can I do?

Best,
AKJ

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Aaron Krister Johnson <aaron@akjmusic.com> wrote:
Hi all--

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this:

I'm considering purchasing PianoTeq, but I wanted to try the demo. It seems to work better with just the alsa driver than it does with jack, a reversal of the usual situation.

I tested this several times by playing fast glissandi on the default piano preset. Each time, my little EEE-PC netbook under jack choked with xruns and a brief silence while PianoTeq 'reset' itself, but Alsa alone chugged away with no xruns unless there was an extreme amount of load....

I'm wondering if anyone can comment on this. It seems odd, especially since the jack developers claim jack adds no latency by itself to the picture in any situation---so, do we have a situation where the code is better written for the alsa driver than for jackd? It seems we do, in this case....

Best,
AKJ





--
Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.untwelve.org