[XCSSA] Christmas Lights Display

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

On Dec 29, 2009, at 12:22 PM, X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 2:22 PM, X-otic Computer Systems of San
> Antonio <xcssa at xcssa.org> wrote:
>> Windows scheduler? Gonna have to call you out on that one, Tweeks, and I'm a Linux guy :) Windows seems like it can do better realtime processing than in Linux out of the box. No better example than audio handling. That will own your Linux box all over the place with high latency, poor timing, and all sorts of fun things.
>> 
> That's a poor example, as the issue is likely sound card support, NOT threads.
> A comparison between video cards that BOTH OS's support would be
> better (but only if the 'proprietary' card allows open access to the
> video driver source code).

More like poor driver support. Under Linux sound card support is extremely inferior. Which is a shame - I'd love to move to using Linux to make music. That said, you still need OS support for it and, besides, I'm also talking about threads. You need low latency not only with the audio handling but also with capturing, filtering, and reoutputting the audio. Not to mention generating audio (via software instruments - ala VSTs).

So basically, I have a number of threads all of which need to offer low latency synchronized audio and MIDI. Linux can't do that. If you can make it do that, I"ll give you...$1 :) Good luck.

Windows, on the other hand, can. Now, I'll admit, this example is just a process of multiple threads, but you can add in things like Rewire, where you have multiple applications talking to each other which also need to be carefully timed.

In other words, you can't simplify this down to just sound card support. It's WAY more than that and it IS, in fact, a threading issue.

Tim