[PD] PD really slow, crashing and no sound

[William Robinson]

Hi again.


> the sluggish behaviour. But it seems, this is related to the sound
> input or at least the sound in full duplex. (You could try to use
> "-nodac" to check the other end of half duplex as well to see if Pd
> then still is sluggish.)
> 

Ok, I'll try to do this in a bit more of an scientific way.


OSS, Full-Duplex
	No audio in or out at all. GUI very unresponsive as described
before.	I've tried using a variety of blocksizes 8192 and 1024. Also, I
tried a variety of sample rates: 48000, 44100, 24000 and 22050. Getting
these messages on the output: 

OSS: issuing first ADC 'read' ... Pd: system call timed out
...done.


OSS, Half-Duplex, -nodac, Input only
	Again, very sluggish/unresponsive. At all sample rates, getting some
evidence of audio input, where the first two numbers connected to the
"pd -------audio----" object get set to values around 36 and 34 or 39
and 35 after the window has been open for a few seconds, regardless of
whether I make any input at all. Still get the "Pd: system call timed
out" messages as above. Tried it with the blocksizes and sample rates
above without much difference between them.

OSS, Half-Duplex, -noadc, Output only
	Very responsive, everything seems to work ok. All the blocksizes and
sample rates worked fine.

ALSA, Full-Duplex
	GUI responsive, but no evidence of sound in or out. Tried using same
sample rates and both of my audio devices listed, 1 and 2, being hw:0
and plughw:0. All of them gave output similar to this:

input channels = 2, output channels = 2
device name plughw:0; channels in 2, out 2
audio buffer set to 50
opening sound input...
Sample width set to 4 bytes
opening sound output...
audio I/O stuck... closing audio


That last line appears about a second after the rest of them and I get
no audio still.


ALSA, Half-Duplex -noadc
	This gives pretty much the same behavior as alsa in full-duplex mode,
but without the audio out messages, of course.


So, to summarise, it seems that I just have a problem with my input.
Trying to use any kind of audio input causes me to get no audio at all.
And additionally, on OSS, causes the application to slow up to unusable
speeds (but top says it doesn't take up much cpu time).

Any other ideas? 
Thanks.
bill


> > Thanks for the help. Is there anything that I can do to get full-duplex
> > working? It works with most other programs. 
> 
> I have really no idea and I think this somehow is strange behaviour
> and Pd /should/ work with the AC97 chip.
> 
> Something else to try would be different combinations of samplerate
> and maybe buffer/period sizes (-r/-blocksize in pd). 
> 
> Then in the end, if you intend to do a bit more serious work with
> sound (not only using Pd) I would recommend to get a real soundcard
> anyway. Even a cheap old SBLive will work much better than the Via- or
> any other AC97-chip, and those more expensive cards based on the
> ICE1712 or similar chips are generally working very well, too. 
> 
> Ciao