[PD] latency

[Olaf Matthes]

mattn-l at rogers.com schrieb:
> > i have too much on my plate right now to rip all the portaudio out of pd and
> > replace it with straight CoreAudio calls.  but that's what someone needs to do...

Yes, I think so too. So the question is whether it's worth to use
portaudio in general or not. Looking at the sources it seems that since
the introduction of portaudio into Pd we got at least one additional
audio buffer (and thus additional latency) for each input and output.
I know that portaudio makes it easier to develop Pd beacuse all (audio)
hardware specific things are handled within portaudio. On the other hand
we waste performance and depend on what portaudio does or allows us to
do.

I once thought about using Pd 0.37 on IRIX but I resited to try that
because portaudio for IRIX (which is used in Pd 0.37) uses a audio API
that has been declared obsolete by SGI (and portaudio support for SGI is
declared beta!). The new API is much more flexible and it was quite easy
to implement it into Pd 0.36. So in this case the use of portaudio is a
mayor step back. 
Okay, here's the good part of the story: on Windows it brought us ASIO
support in Pd. So in the end I don't know what to do. But at least on
IRIX I'll stick to Pd 0.36 as long as I can!

Olaf