[PD] Re: latency

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
plessas at sbox.tugraz.at hat gesagt: // plessas at sbox.tugraz.at wrote:

> I understand that there is a big advantage in using portaudio in pd. I am very
> glad that pd runs on any platform I've run across so far, but investing a lot
> of money into fast computers (to achieve low latency) 

High CPU power is not (that) important in regard to low latency. You
can get really good latencies with simple and slow CPUs. You just will
not be able to do really complex computations in short time. But the
latency.pd patch for example does in no way require a fast machine nor
does it run any better on a faster than on a slower machine because of
CPU speed.

> I feel strange by asking for other possibilities than using
> Portaudio, since I appreciate very much all programming work
> everyone has done in the community, which would not be available to
> all users of different platforms.

The problems at hand are not the fault of Portaudio and they will not
get fixed by just ditching PA. You can get *very* low latencies with
PA, as low as the hardware allows. There just are "issues" with
non-reatime tasks inside Pd... 

Re. Linux: You can get lower latencies on Linux than on Windows,
that's true. CoreAudio on OS-X is even better. 

ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__