[CELT-dev] Cross Platform Audio Library

[Ross Bencina]

Jean-Marc Valin wrote:
> Unfortunately, I think the only way I know of achieving very low
> latency is to write low-level code and minimize the abstraction
> layers. At some point, it's likely that your code would have to become
> somewhat soundcard-specific too because not all soundcards do the
> buffering the same way and you'll want to adapt to the soundcard
> buffer rather than let an abstraction layer handle it through more
> buffering. That's my experience anyway.

I tend to agree. Although it's not always soundcard specific -- often it 
depends on the drivers, the host API and the operating system version too. 
Managing all this logic in your app is non-trivial so we're trying to build 
more of this knowledge into PortAudio.

PortAudio also offers a way to specify the low-level buffering parameters 
directly for many native/host-APIs, which works around the issue you 
describe. You don't have to use this mechanism (there is an abstract way to 
specify latency that's completely portable) but if you do, you write a small 
amount of buffer configuration code that is specific to each of the host 
APIs you're interested in -- you can then surface driver specific buffer 
parameters to the user if you want to let them tweak.

Ross.