5 ms·
This is way better than it used to be (I measured half a second latency in 2012: https://www.jefftk.com/p/android-sound-synthesis-and-latency https://www.jefftk
by jefftk 6y ago
This is way better than it used to be (I measured half a second latency in 2012: https://www.jefftk.com/p/android-sound-synthesis-and-latency https://www.jefftk.com/p/android-sound-synthesis-and-latency) but it is still too high to let you use an Android device as a musical instrument. This is something iPhones have always been able to do, and one of my biggest disappointments with Android.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
- thomasahle 6y agoWhat are the equivalent numbers for iPhone? Touch to audio and round-trip times?
- jefftk 6y agohttps://superpowered.com/latency https://superpowered.com/latency has messy data, but it looks like typically single-digit latency.
- S_A_P 6y agoI think typical newish (2014+) devices have between 5-9ms latency. Having core audio from the start was a huge leg up for iOS for sure. I am mostly platform agnostic unless I am working with audio where I pretty much only use Apple products.
- breakfastduck 6y agoCore Audio is the most under appreciated part of the apple ecosystem. It is lightyears ahead of windows / linux audio drivers.
- kall 6y agoThis data [0] doesn't have the latest models, and it's meassuring latency internaly, not "touch-to-sound". The ones they tested average around 7-8ms. I've heard of <10ms as the benchmark for "instant" in audio. Edit: I've been thinking about this and a touch-to-tone latency below 10ms seems imposible, even with the 120hz digitizer on newer iPhones. I would be very interested in seeing some experimental data as well. [0] https://juce.com/discover/stories/Mobile%20performance%20index%20 https://juce.com/discover/stories/Mobile%20performance%20ind...
- thomasahle 6y agoThe best I could find was https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/71301 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/71301 which suggests a 32ms touch latency. I think that might include some processing, but it doesn't seem much better than the 20ms latency in Android mentioned in the article. The audio processing latency seems to be single digit on both systems. In any case, I don't think these differences are big enough to argue that "Android can't be used for instruments".
- cma 6y agoThere are 120hz ipads, so wouldn't that drop to 16ms? A physical piano with a 1.2" hammer blow distance played at soft velocity (~2.2mph), assuming distance of closest resonating surface to ear is half meter, would have around 35ms latency.
- kall 6y agoYeah, I think the numbers in the article should be good enough for a bunch of music use cases, but remember it used to be like half a second which is obviously unworkable. Well financed developers like ROLI already have instruments on android. I think the incredible instruments available on iOS are also there because the App Store promise actually kind of works for them. They write a great application, upload it to server and people buy it for more than 2.99$, upfront. And unlike VSTs, no one even pirates it. The general idea/stereotype is that no one wants that on android. An open source port of VCV Rack would be feasable and wonderful though. That's the only free instrument I have installed on my music iPad. Edit: nevermind, that was not free either.
- de6u99er 6y agoTotally agree. We should not forget that our brain is great at adjusting to latency. In the old days, when I was excessively playing Quake 3 Team Arena it took me just a couple of minutes to adjust to network latency depending on the server I was connected to. Professional musicians do this constantly and are much better at that.
- limeblack 6y agoI agree audio at minimum should have been done differently on Android. The latency(different type I believe) of Spotify applications and even YouTube applications is pretty bad compared to an Apple device. Sometimes the audio just fails to respond for half a second or so. This is not an interface bug from my experience.
- philsnow 6y agoThe article and all the responses here express "latency" as a simple scalar number. Is it actually more like a histogram of values than a scalar, and the marketing number is the 90th %ile of that histogram? My impression is that Android has more latency variance than iOS. If that's true then it's important to be clear what the reported numbers represent.
- Godel_unicode 6y agoLatency variance is known as jitter. What gives you the impression that it would be high on Android?
- philsnow 6y agoHaving used nearly every flagship android device from the HTC Dream up through the Nexus 6p, and then switching to an iphone 6 and never looking back, except watching acquaintances use their android phones. Also from talking to an engineer who worked on earlier generations of iphones, who said that every team had a latency budget that they could not exceed.
- jefftk 6y agoIf you open the audio context you should see consistent latency as long as you keep it open, but each time you open a new audio context you might end up with different latency. You should not see jitter within a single context.
- pjmlp 6y agoOn the 3D side it is similarly disappointing, as Google never put the effort of proper frameworks similar to Apple's kits, and SceneForm on Google's tradition is now deprecated after VR on Android lost its marketing drive.