I worked on an audio system where the response to buffers bottoming-out was to add more buffers. We had buffers everywhere; in the apps, in the audio pipeline,

I worked on an audio system where the response to buffers bottoming-out was to add more buffers. We had buffers everywhere; in the apps, in the audio pipeline, in the USB stack. Ran into a glitch? Go from 5 buffers to 7. Numerology was everywhere. So what happened was that latency was utterly unpredictable, and we had buffers that went dry (starving the output DAC) or filled up anyway. I'd walked into the project a couple years earlier, and wound up spending six cumulative months getting a handle on all the problems, which were distributed amongst several different code bases, and ultimately involved fixing bugs in every single component, including a really nasty one in the OS hypervisor. It was quite a ride. Isochronous audio is hell. Sure, y'all are smarter than the average bear, but . . . isochronous audio is hell, and you're gonna need rollerskates. :-)