comments on late joyrides re: rt performance

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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victor wrote:
...
| Comparing the RT audio performance of the two, I must say
| I am disappointed with how worse it has got.
...
| One of the things I have been playing with is a little MIDI file player
| (one of the test/example activities in
devel.laptop.org/activities/csndsugui),
| which uses a soundfont synthesis engine.

While diminished RT performance is a serious problem, it occurs to me that
a properly designed MIDI file player should not require low latency at
all.  The ALSA audio design makes it easy for applications to request long
buffers..  For example, the Distance activity plays audio with

subprocess.call(["/usr/bin/aplay", "--buffer-time=10000000", fname])

to request a maximum-size buffer, precisely because of the latency issues
that I observed in testing.  (Yes, this is incredibly ugly, but using
gstreamer in a multithreaded python app is uglier.)

Interactive sound synthesis is a different matter, but for pure playback,
perhaps you just need a longer buffer.

- --Ben
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