4 ms·

Audio. A great many people work with audio or want to work with audio, and Windows and OSX are lightyears ahead of Linux in terms of ease of use and overall qu

Audio. A great many people work with audio or want to work with audio, and Windows and OSX are lightyears ahead of Linux in terms of ease of use and overall quality. You'd think the PulseAudio fiasco would have improved the situation, but I believe the developers thought as you did, and so built a system that's woefully encumbered with latency. Jack improves the situation WRT latency, but it comes at the cost of an altogether brittle and broken integration with PA, and thus with all major Linux desktops. Bounded response times may not be needed for your word processor, but there's plenty of folks out there who would be better served by it. Hell, I'd love a snappier editor on account of predictable response times to keypresses.

AsyncAwait 7y ago
> You'd think the PulseAudio fiasco would have improved the situation PA is in rather good shape now & it has capabilities its predecessors didn't. But it's very hard to get people to update their notions about something once it sets in. No matter how much Microsoft tries, Windows will always be 'insecure, virus-ridden', macOS will always be super stable, beautiful, no matter how much Apple screws up & Linux will always be unusable on the desktop no matter how many decades I'll spend enjoying it on the desktop at home and at work. Sadly, it seems a person's mind tends to naturally lean conservative and it takes a herculean effort to regularly update one's preconceived notions.
- dleslie 7y ago
  PulseAudio remains practically unusable for an audio workstation; latency in the tens or twenties of miliseconds are unacceptable.
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    If you want realtime, there's JACK. PA is intended to replace/supplement ALSA, it has features like network transparency, per app volume control, EQ, virtual outputs etc. Not every SW has to have every feature, but PA has useful features ALSA doesn't.
    - snvzz 7y ago
      PA can't supplement ALSA, because PA can't cover all cases. It is not suitable for realtime. It's an exercise on self-delusion to pretend PA can replace ALSA as long as it has this blatant issue.
snvzz 7y ago
In my experience, jack only manages to avoid xruns on reasonably small yet still too large (5ms) buffers when running as SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR, and only on linux-rt. Patch sets like -ck simply don't help with this. Try running cyclictest from rt-tests for a while to see the true horror of Linux behavior.

AsyncAwait 7y ago

> You'd think the PulseAudio fiasco would have improved the situation PA is in rather good shape now & it has capabilities its predecessors didn't. But it's very hard to get people to update their notions about something once it sets in. No matter how much Microsoft tries, Windows will always be 'insecure, virus-ridden', macOS will always be super stable, beautiful, no matter how much Apple screws up & Linux will always be unusable on the desktop no matter how many decades I'll spend enjoying it on the desktop at home and at work. Sadly, it seems a person's mind tends to naturally lean conservative and it takes a herculean effort to regularly update one's preconceived notions.

dleslie 7y ago
PulseAudio remains practically unusable for an audio workstation; latency in the tens or twenties of miliseconds are unacceptable.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  If you want realtime, there's JACK. PA is intended to replace/supplement ALSA, it has features like network transparency, per app volume control, EQ, virtual outputs etc. Not every SW has to have every feature, but PA has useful features ALSA doesn't.
  - snvzz 7y ago
    PA can't supplement ALSA, because PA can't cover all cases. It is not suitable for realtime. It's an exercise on self-delusion to pretend PA can replace ALSA as long as it has this blatant issue.

snvzz 7y ago

In my experience, jack only manages to avoid xruns on reasonably small yet still too large (5ms) buffers when running as SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR, and only on linux-rt. Patch sets like -ck simply don't help with this. Try running cyclictest from rt-tests for a while to see the true horror of Linux behavior.