On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 11:30 +0200, fons adriaensen wrote: > Don't suggest that to a concert master - they tend to be sensitive ;-) >
My mistake, it is of course the other way around. The band following the lead from an acknowledged master of the arts. The lead will have to be somewhat pragmatic though ... Now, to get this thread back on the rails ... There is a set of scenarioes regarding realtime latencies and soundcards, each with their own requirements and pitfalls. For starters we have: The Producer, recording real sounds to harddisk and overdubbing as needed. Here the main obstacle is disk-io and unpredictable kernel locks. The Guitarist, processing the output of an instrument in realtime. The roundtrip from sample-in to sample-out is what bothers. Getting a reliable RT priority saves the day. The Synthesist, calculating a sound from midi trigger input in realtime. This is almost like "The Guitarist", but with only half of the roundtrip buffer worries. (More?) Combinations of the above like, say GigaSampler played from a keyboard while pulling in samples from hd as needed ... or live radio pulling in jingles/commercials at the end of that witty punchline processed with the reverb from hell ... In order to say what kind of buffer size is relevant or optimal, you'll also have to specify what kind of scenario you are targetting. A "synthesist" (that's my scenario), who can't hear *anything* before the end of the pipe, would be very sensitive to jitter (the deviation, or "sloppyness", between triggers and actual sound) and would therefore require the smallest of small buffers. --
