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Comment by seclorum | Hacker News Reader

Audio performance is still dismal. I had really hoped that Android would catch up with iOS in the audio latency department with this release, but my tests so far don't indicate much attention on this deficit yet. A pity, Android tablets would make good synthesizers too ..

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"Android 4.0 provides a direct, efficient path for low-level streaming multimedia" http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0-highlights.html

I've been on the Android audio latency trail since 2009, and recently spoke to some platform developers who've hinted that something is finally on the horizon. I'm too tired of the situation to be blindly optimistic about it, but maybe just maybe...

Fine for streaming .. but audio generation/synthesis? I think not.

It really depends what it gives us. For synthesis what you want is to be able to stream bytes to audio out. You can currently do this with AudioTrack but it goes through IPC and is generally slow. Personally I'd call that a use case for "streaming multimedia" but who knows what it will actually cover.

Really? That's a shame: I was hoping vaguely that the OpenMax AL stuff might get that bit closer.

Have you tried Caustic? That seems to be hitting a sweet spot.

Haven't tried it yet but I will as soon as I can ..

Okay, tried it. Very nice app, wonderful features - but the latency is terrible. I hope we see some improvements in this regard, otherwise iOS will always rule this realm.

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