Low latency audio in Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

[polaris20]

First, the Androids can and do accept external mouse and keyboard, but ipads only have external keyboard to my knowledge.

I have a netbook - a gateway DUAL CORE AMD 64 bit processor with a ATI Radeon video card. It is the larger of the netbooks, but it IS a netbook.

I CANNOT even DJ properly on that thing because it has all kinds of netbook-centric problems that I see in almost all netbooks. Creating music on that would be impossible.

Mike

Serious question: what do you need a mouse for, on a touch-based tablet? The reason I ask is that I can use an iPhone as a touchpad/mouse in apps like Citrix Receiver, and while I found it neat at first, I went back to just using the touchscreen itself because it was faster.

[UltraJv]

I have the Acer aspire one netbook, with windows 7 pro (it came with Linux). Cost £220 - Have loaded massive, zeta+ and a few DAWS on it. Have Djed with Traktor. It works with ASIO4all at 5ms and I used it with my EMU Xboard 49 via USB. Great fun. Did think about trying DIVA on it but havnt so far YMMV.

[IncarnateX]

I CANNOT even DJ properly on that thing because it has all kinds of netbook-centric problems that I see in almost all netbooks. Creating music on that would be impossible.

Mike

Before I went iPad nutty I made Music with Orion and a lot of high end synths, Dune, ACE, Minimoog V, Korg LEGACY, on a 1,6 Ghz Medion Netbook. The trick is to tweak windows so most of the CPU power is free for music production. If you only use a netbook for music, surfing on fav sites, documents and mail, you can turn off a lot of services (e.g. security and communication services) and increase it's performance significantly.
I used Blackvibers tweaks for win XP, here is a link to his Win 7 site:

http://www.blackviper.com/2009/10/01/bl ... er-tweaks/

http://www.blackviper.com/2010/12/17/bl ... gurations/

He also offers win xp and vista tricks.

There are other guides as well. Try google "optimizing windows for music production".

On a netbook these tweaks rocks!

[UltraJv]

Win 7 pro works fine untweaked for me, again YMMV.

[IncarnateX]

Win 7 pro works fine untweaked for me, again YMMV.

Would work even better if you tweaked it

[Sascha Franck]

Being in IT and having had to support a few of the netbooks, I would jump to the conclusion that they're cheap shit. It's my opinion, but none of them, even the $500 models, were worth a damn. And the processors are generally slower than a modern dual core ARM is, when it's saddled with a full-blown OS.

As I own no netbook and have never done anything serious on those of whatever colleagues, I can only trust you here.
But still: For me, the main problem of each and every tablet on the market are a) lousy connectivity and b) a highly proprietary OS. The latter apparently isn't as true for Android, but iOS simply just sucks big time, I have never seen such a lousy OS regarding that very issue (really, I completely fail to understand why those dickheads at Apple limit it in such incredibly stupid ways).
Both of these problems simply don't exist on netbooks.
And while we're in a thread about low latency: I already said so, it's again no issue on netbooks, even if you might be severely limited in terms of computing horsepower. But personally, I'd rather play my guitar at <10 ms through a not too shiny ampsim instead of using the best there is, in case the latter suffers from latency issues - which, for instance, is the case in Garageband. Excellent amp sims but absolutely unplayable (the Apple idiots decided to not offer any latency settings). Really, I'd prefer playing through something such as the Simul Analog suite. At truely low latencies that is.

- Sascha

[golemus]

Has anyone come across any info for a new low-level audio API that will open up Android for real-time audio? I was hoping for improvements in Android 4 (ICS), but I haven't seen much of anything reported so far.

Hey as you created this topic could you put this text to the beginning of it? It would increase the changes that after ICS we get a better android release



*****************************************************
IF YOU WANT AUDIO AND MUSIC APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID PLEASE EXPRESS YOURSELF AND VOTE BY GOING TO THE FOLLOWING TOPIC AND CLICKING THE STAR IN THE UPPERLEFT CORNER:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues ... ry%20Stars

This will rise the imporance of the issue and maybe eventually Android developers will do something about it.
*****************************************************

[UltraJv]

Has anyone come across any info for a new low-level audio API that will open up Android for real-time audio? I was hoping for improvements in Android 4 (ICS), but I haven't seen much of anything reported so far.

Hey as you created this topic could you put this text to the beginning of it? It would increase the changes that after ICS we get a better android release



*****************************************************
IF YOU WANT AUDIO AND MUSIC APPLICATIONS FOR ANDROID PLEASE EXPRESS YOURSELF AND VOTE BY GOING TO THE FOLLOWING TOPIC AND CLICKING THE STAR IN THE UPPERLEFT CORNER:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues ... ry%20Stars

This will rise the imporance of the issue and maybe eventually Android developers will do something about it.
*****************************************************

There are ways of getting low latency on Android if you like being techy :

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

but maybe it coud be tackled by a wrapper/driver? Something for Wuschel/Michael Tippach. (of ASIO4ALL fame) - if they are monitoring. What say you?

[golemus]

There are ways of getting low latency on Android if you like being techy :

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

but maybe it coud be tackled by a wrapper/driver? Something for Wuschel/Michael Tippach. (of ASIO4ALL fame) - if they are monitoring. What say you?

Not much of a use for app developers or average users even if you were able to do it with a tweak. As far as I have understood installing Cyanogenmod will void the warranty of the phone and a lot of people don't want to get rid of it.

It should be standard functionality like directX in windows or something...

I must say I am really curious what is the reason Google has not implemented this. It is one of the top Android issues with over 1000 stars so they surely must have noticed it.

[UltraJv]

There are ways of getting low latency on Android if you like being techy :

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

but maybe it coud be tackled by a wrapper/driver? Something for Wuschel/Michael Tippach. (of ASIO4ALL fame) - if they are monitoring. What say you?

Not much of a use for app developers or average users even if you were able to do it with a tweak. As far as I have understood installing Cyanogenmod will void the warranty of the phone and a lot of people don't want to get rid of it.

It should be standard functionality like directX in windows or something...

I must say I am really curious what is the reason Google has not implemented this. It is one of the top Android issues with over 1000 stars so they surely must have noticed it.

It does void some warranties, in the same way that putting another OS other than the supplied one does on a desktop/tower/laptop. Easily reversed. Im sure Google will get round to the audio latency bit eventually, its just not high on the list.

[Sascha Franck]

There are ways of getting low latency on Android if you like being techy :

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

I've been looking up the features of that modification and nowhere on that site does it say anything about latency. Huh?

- Sascha

[UltraJv]

There are ways of getting low latency on Android if you like being techy :

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

I've been looking up the features of that modification and nowhere on that site does it say anything about latency. Huh?

- Sascha

I have it on my LG GT540, it flies as its compiled for performance and latency isnt a problem.

[Sascha Franck]

I have it on my LG GT540, it flies as its compiled for performance and latency isnt a problem.

Can you please be more specific? What are the exact numbers?

- Sascha

[UltraJv]

I have it on my LG GT540, it flies as its compiled for performance and latency isnt a problem.

Can you please be more specific? What are the exact numbers?

- Sascha

No way of measuring it. When I play with the keyboard on Caustic, its instant. My guess is less than 10ms.

[polaris20]

Being in IT and having had to support a few of the netbooks, I would jump to the conclusion that they're cheap shit. It's my opinion, but none of them, even the $500 models, were worth a damn. And the processors are generally slower than a modern dual core ARM is, when it's saddled with a full-blown OS.

As I own no netbook and have never done anything serious on those of whatever colleagues, I can only trust you here.
But still: For me, the main problem of each and every tablet on the market are a) lousy connectivity and b) a highly proprietary OS. The latter apparently isn't as true for Android, but iOS simply just sucks big time, I have never seen such a lousy OS regarding that very issue (really, I completely fail to understand why those dickheads at Apple limit it in such incredibly stupid ways).
Both of these problems simply don't exist on netbooks.
And while we're in a thread about low latency: I already said so, it's again no issue on netbooks, even if you might be severely limited in terms of computing horsepower. But personally, I'd rather play my guitar at <10 ms through a not too shiny ampsim instead of using the best there is, in case the latter suffers from latency issues - which, for instance, is the case in Garageband. Excellent amp sims but absolutely unplayable (the Apple idiots decided to not offer any latency settings). Really, I'd prefer playing through something such as the Simul Analog suite. At truely low latencies that is.

- Sascha

Latency in GB for iOS? I don't have issues with it at all. What are you using for an input? I'm using the Apogee, and it all works really well.