Google I/O 2013 - High Performance Audio

What people said

on_and_off · 2015-12 · Strong recommendation

If you want an in-depth explanation (AP mostly skims the surface) : [VIDEO] is a must-watch. Obviously, it does not cover the work accomplished these past two years, but it gives a good idea of the challenges of audio latency on Android

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Polyphonie · 2015-12 · Recommendation

You can watch this I/O session from a few years back: [VIDEO] It probably provides the best insight to the problem Google engineers were and probably is still facing in regards to high performance audio on Android. Even when the latency is brought down, there's still other audio related issues/glitches (like buffer underruns). Even now that Android is measurably better than it was previously, things like buffer underruns can still affect the overall usability. Increasing the buffer (to fix the underruns) render the device less suitable for such things as using it with external MIDI controller. You can see from Superpowered's audio latency measurements: [LINK] that the buffer for iOS is half that of the best Android (the dual-core Nexus 9)- 64 instead of 128 for Android. I

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dottrap · 2015-04 · Recommendation

This is a great description of the lowest level problem. But for those wondering why iOS doesn't have the problem or why only 10ms is such a difference, the answer is that this is only the beginning of the problem of Android audio latency. There are still additional problems that add latency that span the entire Android stack from the actual hardware and drivers, to the kernel and scheduler, to the Android implementation of their audio APIs. Anybody who has tried to do any serious audio on Android knows the infamous Bug 3434: [LINK] Google I/O 2013 did a pretty good talk on the problem and shows how there are problems across the entire stack. Glenn Kasten pretty much carries the brunt of all the audio problems with Android. I find it telling that he had to handcraft his own latency measurement device using an oscilloscope and LED because there were no actual tools built into the OS to help them analyze performance. [VIDEO] Audio has been terrible since Android's inception. It has improved a little over time, but unfortunately, 7 years later is is still pretty much unacceptable for any serious work.

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