I am working on an audio-application with java 1.4, and I noticed that with the current alsa-release the time neccessary to initialize my Terratec DMX6fire card for playback (in oss emulation mode) increased a lot since older versions.
I wrote a small program to measure the time it takes for simply starting the playback of a wav/aiff file. I noticed that the 0.9.8 release uses a _lot_ more time on the AudioSystem.getMixerInfo() call (which searches for all available devices) than older versions. I also noticed that the times differ a lot for different JDKs, so here are the results for the sun-jdk-1.4.2.01, blackdown-jdk-1.4.1 and ibm-jdk-1.4.1 with the different alsa-driver versions.
alsa-driver 0.9.2 - 0.9.3a: sun: 3.2- 3.3 sec bdn: 1.9- 2.0 sec ibm: 0.7- 0.8 sec
alsa-driver 0.9.3b - 0.9.7: sun: 6.2- 6.3 sec bdn: 13.7-13.8 sec ibm: 3.7- 3.9 sec
alsa-driver 0.9.8: sun: 48.0-48.5 sec bdn: 24.7-24.8 sec ibm: 13.7-13.8 sec
alsa-driver cvs-nov-02: sun: 20.7-20.9 sec bdn: 24.8-24.9 sec ibm: 13.8-13.9 sec
So things got worse between 0.9.3a and .b (the same moment the mplayer-oss-emulation-delay problem occured!) and 0.9.7 and 0.9.8. Current CVS version is working a bit better for sun's jdk, but not for the others. I did not try different alsa-lib versions (used 0.9.2 all the time) - don't know if this would make any difference.
I attached the source code of the small programm, its syntax is:
java AudioTest AUDIOFILE [DEVICE_NO]
where DEVICE_NO is the index of the java-mixer-device to be used (they get listed if you start it without the second parameter)
Gruss, Steffen
import javax.sound.sampled.*; /** * * @author fali */ public class AudioTest { /** Creates a new instance of AudioTest */ public AudioTest() { } private static void playAudioFile(String fileName, int device) throws UnsupportedAudioFileException, LineUnavailableException, java.io.IOException { long beginTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("checking for available devices on this system..."); Mixer.Info[] mixerInfos = AudioSystem.getMixerInfo(); for (int i=0; i<mixerInfos.length; i++) { System.out.println(i+" "+mixerInfos[i].getName()+"\t"+mixerInfos[i].getVendor()); } System.out.println(); System.out.println("getting mixer device "+mixerInfos[device].getName()+"..."); Mixer mixer = AudioSystem.getMixer(mixerInfos[device]); System.out.println("got mixer device, trying to open it..."); mixer.open(); System.out.println("mixer device opened, checking supported lines..."); Line.Info[] supportedLines = mixer.getSourceLineInfo(); for (int i=0; i<supportedLines.length; i++) { System.out.println(supportedLines[i].toString()); } System.out.println(); java.io.File file = new java.io.File(fileName); AudioInputStream audioInputStream = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(file); AudioFormat audioFormat = audioInputStream.getFormat(); System.out.println("audio file opened, format is "+audioFormat.toString()); Line.Info lineInfo = new DataLine.Info(SourceDataLine.class, audioFormat); System.out.println("obtaining SourceDataLine for that AudioFormat..."); SourceDataLine sourceDataLine = (SourceDataLine)mixer.getLine(lineInfo); System.out.println("opening SourceDataLine..."); sourceDataLine.open(audioFormat); System.out.println("starting SourceDataLine..."); sourceDataLine.start(); long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); float seconds = (endTime-beginTime)/1000.0f; System.out.println("it took "+seconds+" seconds to start playback."); byte[] buf = new byte[1024]; int bytesRead = 0; while(bytesRead>=0) { bytesRead = audioInputStream.read(buf); if (bytesRead>0) { sourceDataLine.write(buf, 0, bytesRead); } } sourceDataLine.stop(); sourceDataLine.close(); audioInputStream.close(); } public static void main(String[] args) { try { if (args.length==0) { System.err.println("first argument has to be an audio file."); System.exit(-1); } String fileName = args[0]; int device = 0; if (args.length==2) { device = Integer.parseInt(args[1]); } playAudioFile(fileName, device); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } }