[PD] Latency compensation

Roman Haefeli reduzent at gmail.com
Wed Oct 19 10:20:05 CEST 2016


[replying to pd-list]

Hi Simon

On Wed, 2016-10-12 at 09:30 +0200, Simon Iten wrote:
> it would very much surprise me, if pd could do that in a generic way
> on all platforms. even daws or live struggle to do this *right* on
> different systems. 

I'm not sure it's totally impossible. With jack, the latency is
dependent on jackd's settings and I don't whether Pd has a change to
know those. With ALSA, everything you need to know to calculate the
latency Pd already knows.

> why don't  you patch a little tester app that sends some generated
> sounds, preferably with very clear attack, out and record this back
> in. that way you can measure the (roundtrip) latency of the whole
> system.

Of course, that is a way. "Knowing" the latency instead of "measuring"
it would be so nice, though.

> with a click track and a good musician that plays with it (that you
> record) you should be able to align generated sounds and live
> recorded material. this is how we do it in the studio if necessary :)
> but it is far from an automated process...

To make things at least a bit more feasible, I make the measured or
calculated latency a configuration parameter, so that when you fire Pd
up the next time with the same setup, the patch remembers the latency.

Roman


> Am Sonntag, 9. Oktober 2016 schrieb Roman Haefeli :
> > Hi all, 
> > 
> > I'm currently investigating audio latency compensation in Pd. The
> > goal
> > is for recorded audio to align well with generated sounds timing-
> > wise.
> > I'm wondering now what methods people already have employed in
> > order to
> > achieve that goal.
> > 
> > So far, I was able to find the formulas to calculate the correct
> > latency when using ALSA and JACK audio back-ends as long as the
> > paramaters 'Delay(msec)' and 'Block size' for ALSA, respectively
> > 'Frames/period' and 'Periods/buffer' for JACK are known. Currently,
> > this approach works, but requires me to tell the latency
> > compensation
> > calculator what driver I'm using and what the current settings are.
> > Also, it yet only works on Linux, but not with any other drivers
> > like
> > CoreAudio, ASIO, etc.
> > 
> > How can I achieve correct latency compensation reliably on any
> > platform? Is there some more generic way?
> > 
> > I'm also looking at IEM's mediasettings library, hoping it would
> > deliver the required information to calculate latency. The
> > README.txt
> > says 'get/set Audio and MIDI settings within Pd', but I wasn't able
> > to
> > find a way to _get_ current settings other than 'advance 100',
> > which
> > probably refers to 'Delay(msec)' set to '100'. But still, if it
> > would
> > give all Pd audio settings, how would it know about current jackd
> > settings?
> > 
> > Roman
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