[PD] drop out free audio on windows

[Roman Haefeli]

hi all

every now and then i hear people complaining here in the list or on
#dataflow in irc, that audio is affected (drop outs), when doing some
gui stuff in pd on windows. i don't know about osx, but on linux, i
never experienced, that the gui was the cause for drop-outs, even if it
consumes a lot of cpu power. i assume, this is because the gui-process
and the dsp engine are started with different priorities on linux. 
today i wanted to test one of my patches on windows. it is part of the
patch, that a visible array is updated every 100ms. indeed, i got a
drop-out on every update, so that my patch sounded like an uzi. turning
the array update off removed also the drop-outs. i found out, that
'pd.com' and 'wish84.exe' were running with the same priority, so i set
'pd.com' in the windows task manager to 'realtime priority'. as usual,
windows pops-up a message saying that this is dangerous and might harm
the system. however, after that i could turn on the array update without
getting drop-outs anymore.

i just wanted all the windows user to let know, that there _is_ a way to
optimize your pd. probably someone with a deeper knowledge about windows
than me knows a way, how to set priorities permanently, so that it
doesn't need to be changed in taskmanager after each launch of pd (?).

i tested with:
windows xp home
pd vanilla 0.40.2

roman
 



	
		
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