Yonghao Wang, Ryan Stables, Joshua Reiss,
Using commodity computers in conjunction with live music digital audio
workstations (DAW) has become increasingly more popular in recent years. The
latency of these DAW audio processing chains for some application such as live
audio monitoring has always been perceived as a problem when DSP audio effects
are needed. With “High Definition Audio” being standardized as the onboard
soundcard’s hardware architecture for personal computers, and with advances in
audio APIs, the low latency and multichannel capability has made its way into
home studios. This paper will discuss the results of latency measurements of
current popular operating systems and hosts applications with different audio
APIs and audio processing loads.
Convention Paper 8081
To avoid the effects from the variety hardware platform, the test platform are Intel based iMac and MacBook to be able to install three different popular operating systems. The test platforms are limited to onboard soundcards, default audio APIs and audio drivers. However the external soundcard with manufacture based driver are tested for cross-reference purpose. The Audio DSP hardware and a couple of digital audio mixing consoles are also tested to get reference testing results to compare. The DAWs then tested with different buffer size and different stress (internal audio stress and external CPU stress).
For more details, please see the paper. And you can email me (yonghao.wang at elec.qmul.ac.uk) if you have any comments on this.
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