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Andrew Huang recently made a YouTube video [0] that provides some insight from the perspective of a music producer and someone who recently created a music prod

Andrew Huang recently made a YouTube video [0] that provides some insight from the perspective of a music producer and someone who recently created a music production app. It's not overly technical, but it highlights some of the challenges one might face. As the article says, there is room for improvement, so I guess it's good to see that the long term goal is 10ms round trip. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=-sPbcTcUmcI https://youtube.com/watch?v=-sPbcTcUmcI

Naac 6y ago
That was a strange video. It seemed like he started talking about latency between Android and IOS devices, which makes sense given that this article talks about response time of just under 40 ms like you said. The article says this is "well within the range required for real-time applications" if you define real-time applications as non-pro-audio stuff. If you're playing an instrument and it takes 40 ms for you to hear back the sound, that's Not Good. But then the video takes a strange turn and starts talking about "Stability" of mac vs PC, and I had to turn it off. It made the argument that "I haven't seen any professional producers use anything except macs" as its main argument. It would have been nice to hear some more technical information like mentioning core-audio, or something else. Regarding the article itself. I'm excited that Android is target less than 20 ms round-trip latency. I'm hoping that this work can be brought back to the Linux Desktop. Messing around with Jack and dealing with xruns is something I wish I could stop doing.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  >"I haven't seen any professional producers use anything except macs" as its main argument. Yeah that is both totally irrelevant to the topic at hand and also a bit strange. I have only seen PCs in the pro studios I have used but that doesn't make me believe nothing else is used.
  - smoldesu 6y ago
    Same here. I've even seen an increased number of Linux-based studios, oftentimes running Bitwig or Reaper. I don't doubt that audio latency can be a little high on some workflows, but I've honestly had a less laggy experience with Pulse than Coreaudio. Out of the box, Bitwig has a latency of ~8ms on my (Linux) machine, as opposed to 20ms on my Macbook.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Linux audio can be real bad but the one thing that could possibly make it worse is taking anything from Android. Android is the only computing platform I have ever used that was unable to play a simple audio file through without the audio dropping out at least once (I had the same experience on multiple devices, 5+ years apart). Have you looked at Pipewire?
  - Naac 6y ago
    I've started to. But I haven't done enough research on how all the other applications I use ( Carla, Ardour, soft synths, etc ) will play along with Pipewire instead of jack.
- kall 6y ago
  To be a little pedantic: He is not claiming that producers are never using PCs, he is claiming that live audio never runs on PC, because stability is the top priority there. Later he says in the studio you can tolerate a little instability if the other benefits of windows are worth it. That no producers are using windows PCs is an obviously false claim. There are DAWs that don't even run on mac. There are also live production tools that don't, like Notch, so there must be someone running windows on stage, anyway. That macs are more stable in day-to-day operation is not really a bold claim though.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    > That macs are more stable in day-to-day operation is not really a bold claim though. It absolutely is. Do you have any data to back up the claim? Anecdotally windows 10's stability seems vastly superior, especially with every release of MacOS seemingly regressing further and further.
    - theshrike79 6y ago
      I got the idea that "stability" here doesn't refer to crashing, but more about the fact that the computer behaves in a consistent manner. You won't get a sudden I/O or CPU load during important operations for example.
      - ungamedplayer 6y ago
        Thats also untrue of osx, spotlight indexing, cron jobs, etc.
    - jb1991 6y ago
      I just ran ‘uptime’ on my Mac terminal. 194 days. I pretty much never reboot the thing. It’s just always stable, despite hundreds, maybe thousands, of sleep-wake cycles, usually a dozen apps open at one time, the thing is as stable now as it was when I rebooted it some six months ago. I used to use windows, for a decade, and certainly never had any experience like that.

Naac 6y ago

That was a strange video. It seemed like he started talking about latency between Android and IOS devices, which makes sense given that this article talks about response time of just under 40 ms like you said. The article says this is "well within the range required for real-time applications" if you define real-time applications as non-pro-audio stuff. If you're playing an instrument and it takes 40 ms for you to hear back the sound, that's Not Good. But then the video takes a strange turn and starts talking about "Stability" of mac vs PC, and I had to turn it off. It made the argument that "I haven't seen any professional producers use anything except macs" as its main argument. It would have been nice to hear some more technical information like mentioning core-audio, or something else. Regarding the article itself. I'm excited that Android is target less than 20 ms round-trip latency. I'm hoping that this work can be brought back to the Linux Desktop. Messing around with Jack and dealing with xruns is something I wish I could stop doing.

Daho0n 6y ago
>"I haven't seen any professional producers use anything except macs" as its main argument. Yeah that is both totally irrelevant to the topic at hand and also a bit strange. I have only seen PCs in the pro studios I have used but that doesn't make me believe nothing else is used.
- smoldesu 6y ago
  Same here. I've even seen an increased number of Linux-based studios, oftentimes running Bitwig or Reaper. I don't doubt that audio latency can be a little high on some workflows, but I've honestly had a less laggy experience with Pulse than Coreaudio. Out of the box, Bitwig has a latency of ~8ms on my (Linux) machine, as opposed to 20ms on my Macbook.
ubercow13 6y ago
Linux audio can be real bad but the one thing that could possibly make it worse is taking anything from Android. Android is the only computing platform I have ever used that was unable to play a simple audio file through without the audio dropping out at least once (I had the same experience on multiple devices, 5+ years apart). Have you looked at Pipewire?
- Naac 6y ago
  I've started to. But I haven't done enough research on how all the other applications I use ( Carla, Ardour, soft synths, etc ) will play along with Pipewire instead of jack.
kall 6y ago
To be a little pedantic: He is not claiming that producers are never using PCs, he is claiming that live audio never runs on PC, because stability is the top priority there. Later he says in the studio you can tolerate a little instability if the other benefits of windows are worth it. That no producers are using windows PCs is an obviously false claim. There are DAWs that don't even run on mac. There are also live production tools that don't, like Notch, so there must be someone running windows on stage, anyway. That macs are more stable in day-to-day operation is not really a bold claim though.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  > That macs are more stable in day-to-day operation is not really a bold claim though. It absolutely is. Do you have any data to back up the claim? Anecdotally windows 10's stability seems vastly superior, especially with every release of MacOS seemingly regressing further and further.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    I got the idea that "stability" here doesn't refer to crashing, but more about the fact that the computer behaves in a consistent manner. You won't get a sudden I/O or CPU load during important operations for example.
    - ungamedplayer 6y ago
      Thats also untrue of osx, spotlight indexing, cron jobs, etc.
  - jb1991 6y ago
    I just ran ‘uptime’ on my Mac terminal. 194 days. I pretty much never reboot the thing. It’s just always stable, despite hundreds, maybe thousands, of sleep-wake cycles, usually a dozen apps open at one time, the thing is as stable now as it was when I rebooted it some six months ago. I used to use windows, for a decade, and certainly never had any experience like that.