linuxaudio.org

On Tuesday 05 October 2010, at 14.39.25, Arnout Engelen  wrote:

[...]

quoted text
> > Hence it's impossible to accurately honor the frame/time stamp of a midi

> > event. That's what drove drove the experimentation with splitting the

> > audio generation down to tighter blocks.

>

> Yes, that could be an interesting way to reduce (though not eliminate

> entirely) jitter even at large jack period sizes.

Not only that. As long as the "fragment" initialization overhead can be kept

low, smaller fragments (within reasonable limits) can also improve throughput

as a result of smaller memory footprint.
Depending on the design, a synthesizer with a large number of voices playing

can have a rather large memory footprint (intermediate buffers etc), which can

be significantly reduced by doing the processing in smaller fragments.
Obviously, this depends a lot on the design and what hardware you're running

on, but you can be pretty certain that no modern CPU likes the occasional

short bursts of accesses scattered over a large memory area - especially not

when other application code keeps pushing your synth code and data out of the

cache between the audio callbacks.
--

//David Olofson - Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate
.--- Games, examples, libraries, scripting, sound, music, graphics ---.

|  http://olofson.net   http://kobodeluxe.com   http://audiality.org  |

|  http://eel.olofson.net  http://zeespace.net   http://reologica.se  |

'---------------------------------------------------------------------'

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