Re: OpenSound - was Re: lockmgr patch

[oliver oli <oliver.oli@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Turner wrote:
> With the smaller buffering / stricter monitoring requirements,
> scheduling deadlines become more of an issue as dropouts start to occur,
> which is also possibly 'less acceptable' in the 'professional' case
> (this is very use-case-dependent), and things may or may not be
> compounded by heavy data processing, etc.

undetected dropouts in a pro audio environment are not acceptable. you 
don't want lose a single sample when you record audio and at least you 
want to know if dropouts occur.

> From the research / discussions on the LAD list, it seems like the
> 'consumer' OS's (Windows, MacOS "classic", OS-X) have some kind of
> special scheduler hooks or API's for these kinds of scenarios
> (DirectSound, CoreAudio, etc) and that this is a 'hard problem' (TM)

It is a hard problem (thats my impression from reading the Linux audio 
mailing lists). If I were a musician or pro audio user, I would buy an 
Apple only for CoreAudio, although Linux is now a much better audio 
platform than it was some years ago.

If you want to run pro audio software (on BSD) you want to run a jack 
server. Has anyone tried to port jackd or jackdmp to Dragonfly? Is there 
any chance that it can run low-latency (64 samples / 48khz = 1.3 ms)?