Hacker News Reader

Comment by weepy | Hacker News Reader

If you are on Windows you need to use an ASIO soundcard ?

Ah, it's possible analog31 isn't using ASIO card, I assumed they are as they seem to have tried to jam before so also assumed they were a musician and I haven't met many who doesn't use ASIO in the first place.

Ah, that's interesting. I'm using a USB audio interface. It claims to be ASIO compatible. Oddly enough I tried the same interface in different computers, and have tried other computers, but haven't dug much further than that. I've also tried all of this on a decent Ubuntu box, and I've now got it running on a Raspberry Pi 3 since the overall latency has been more less the same in all cases.

We're all analog musicians playing alcohol powered instruments. ;-) Some of us are techies, others not. While I'm a techie, that side of my life has always been somewhat separate from the musical side, so I haven't paid that much attention to the digital technology until the pandemic came along. But I'm happy to learn, especially if something simple can make it work better.

You need to switch the drivers from WDM to ASIO. Most DAWs have this as an explicit choice with WDM as the default.

I think WASAPI has comparable latency to ASIO drivers. I can get around 20-30ms latency with WASAPI though ASIO takes me down to 10-15. Granted I'm using a dedicated USB audio interface though.

You should be able to easily sustain below 5ms buffer size, and RT_PREEMPT Linux has no problems keeping a few hundred microseconds of buffer filled (a suitable PCIe soundcard should easily make 100us buffer level reliable; that's 9.6 samples at 96kHz sample rate).

Yes, sub-ms latency is hard. But the infrastructure exists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com