Comment by Naac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Naac | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Thats also untrue of osx, spotlight indexing, cron jobs, etc.

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.

The only time I ever reboot Windows 10 is to apply updates, which mac os also forces you to do. Windows doesn't even go down if a driver crashes anymore.

Updates alone put my old macbook pro at lower availability than any of my windows or Linux systems since MacOS manages to have a uniquely slow update system. I don't get how major MacOS updates manages to be several times slower than fresh installs of Windows or Linux.

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?

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.

>"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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com