An update on Android's audio latency

Usually, "an update on [blank]" is euphemism for said product getting cancelled.

More to the point, one of PulseAudio's claims was that they consumed less CPU than Android's audio pipeline. With the recent hyped PipeWire, I wonder how that compares to Android's Oboe.

Andrew Huang recently made a YouTube video [0] that provides some insight from the perspective of a music producer and someone who recently created a music production app. It's not overly technical, but it highlights some of the challenges one might face.

As the article says, there is room for improvement, so I guess it's good to see that the long term goal is 10ms round trip.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=-sPbcTcUmcI

That was a strange video. It seemed like he started talking about latency between Android and IOS devices, which makes sense given that this article talks about response time of just under 40 ms like you said. The article says this is "well within the range required for real-time applications" if you define real-time applications as non-pro-audio stuff. If you're playing an instrument and it takes 40 ms for you to hear back the sound, that's Not Good.

But then the video takes a strange turn and starts talking about "Stability" of mac vs PC, and I had to turn it off. It made the argument that "I haven't seen any professional producers use anything except macs" as its main argument.

It would have been nice to hear some more technical information like mentioning core-audio, or something else.

Regarding the article itself. I'm excited that Android is target less than 20 ms round-trip latency. I'm hoping that this work can be brought back to the Linux Desktop. Messing around with Jack and dealing with xruns is something I wish I could stop doing.

I chuckled at the fact that their figures still have spell checker wavy underline :p

The figure of most interest to someone playing an electronic instrument is "tap-to-touch latency". The article indicates a minimum of 43 ms for that (28 round trip latency - 5 audio input latency + 20 touch latency). That's like ten times what you'd hope for.