An update on Android's audio latency • Hacker News Board

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#141

Post by lloeki » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 12:38 PM UTC

smallerfish wrote: post #136

lloeki wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What. Our brain is absolutely terrible at adjusting for latency. It can somewhat compensate, but only to an extent, and at severe cost. There’s this video around that puts people in a VR helmet playing A/V with a delay, even the lowest setting completely destroys any form of efficiency. Anything below 60Hz in VR has a significantly increased chance of giving motion sickness due to latency. Playing Super Mario Bros in…

Do you find it impossible to talk to a person 10 feet away? Because their audio has a roughly 10ms latency.

No, because I don’t have to react on their output on a millisecond timescale.

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#142

Post by phh » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

foobar33333 wrote: post #92

andrepd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? I can choose not to install google services in my phone, and use an open app store like F-Droid. Not that it counts for much in the grand scheme of things, seeing as 99% of users will never install a custom rom.

It used to be possible to dip your toes in with light modifications while still keeping everything working. Now with verified boot chains, safety net and hardware backed verification, you either have everything fully locked down or you go full Richard Stallman and have everything foss.

That's objectively wrong. Less than 1% of apps require verified boot/safetynet/hardware attestation.

I'm running my own Android ROM without cheating Safetynet and I still have access to everything I use using their original unmodified uncheated app: Netflix, Spotify, my banks, all my connected objects (withings, Philips hue, bluetens, neato), or some other random apps.

There are things that don't work, it's true. The only I have witnessed are Pokemon Go, and NFC payment apps (like g pay). This is very far from the "go all floss RMS-style"

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#143

Post by AndriyKunitsyn » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

summm wrote: post #28

kevingadd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are low latency bluetooth protocols, if you sort by latency on rtings for aptx-LL you can see some headsets are down below 40ms. Of course, this relies on both the host and the headset having support for the protocol and being engineered well. SBC and aptX just aren't designed for low latency, and low latency is something that can't be hacked into every codec after the fact.

apt-x is designed for ransom extraction via "intellectual property" licensing.

How is this different from any other licensing?

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#144

Post by kaba0 » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #69

thefourthchime wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that this “open” environment of android now is nearly the opposite. With any android device openly spying on you while locking down all the open source apps you might want to install.

What does this mean? I can choose not to install google services in my phone, and use an open app store like F-Droid. Not that it counts for much in the grand scheme of things, seeing as 99% of users will never install a custom rom.

Can you really install a custom rom, when it flushes proprietary firmware for eg the camera? There are only a handful of devices that doesn’t do that afaik.

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#145

Post by layoutIfNeeded » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #71

Blueskytech wrote: post #60

If android can get its audio latency act together there is some real opportunity here to steal market share from Apple. Since the release of the 2nd iPad Pro Apple has forced audio processing onto the slower low power CPU core, this means that for the last three years I can run all my iOS synth applications at 96kHZ with a low buffer sample size without any drop outs on my first gen iPad Pro and an iPad mini 3. What…

I've noticed an increase in measured latencies, but didn't know about that slower CPU core thing. Sad to see Apple take such a direction - musicians appreciated having proper hardware/software and Apple definitely made money on all the paid content. Why let this arrangement fall by the wayside?

The 10x engineers have either left Apple or were reorganized to gimmick projects like SwiftUI.

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#146

Post by anaisbetts » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #97

snvzz wrote: post #94

40ms is way too much. To put it in perspective, at 60Hz, that's almost 3 frames of video. 10ms would start to be useful for music, but I wouldn't call it good until it was below 2ms, which is what I run my jackd setup (which requires linux-rt) at. I'm afraid we won't see good latency until Android moves away from Linux. The good news is that this is bound to happen, sooner or latter, as Fuchsia exists.

Speed of sound is one foot per millisecond. 40ms is 40 feet. Bands play with that kind of separation all the time.

The latency that matters is the discrepancy between what you feel with your fingers and what you hear. Your finger nerves respond extremely quickly, and if what you hear is delayed from what you feel by more than ~10ms, it is extremely jarring and basically unusable

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#147

Post by kuschku » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

Grazester wrote: post #61

kuschku wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Pixel phone so far stopped getting updates after 2 years.

Not true actually. Google now updates these devices for 3 years now and not just security updates

Tell that to my Pixel 1, still stuck on an ancient version without security updates.

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#148

Post by bondolo » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

It is welcome to hear that Google is working on this because sound latency is critical for visually impaired users using text to speech on their phones. The TTS latency is on top of the sound latency and can be significant, to the point where the UI is unresponsive or falls behind. Any improvements they can make will be greatly appreciated.

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#149

Post by jefftk » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #125

de6u99er wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. We should not forget that our brain is great at adjusting to latency. In the old days, when I was excessively playing Quake 3 Team Arena it took me just a couple of minutes to adjust to network latency depending on the server I was connected to. Professional musicians do this constantly and are much better at that.

What. Our brain is absolutely terrible at adjusting for latency. It can somewhat compensate, but only to an extent, and at severe cost. There’s this video around that puts people in a VR helmet playing A/V with a delay, even the lowest setting completely destroys any form of efficiency. Anything below 60Hz in VR has a significantly increased chance of giving motion sickness due to latency. Playing Super Mario Bros in…

> Try playing on Zoom, it’s absolutely impossible (unless you assume latency is fixed, which it is not, and play in a tempo matching latency exactly, and follow the lead but time-warp your play by one beat, which I imagine is possible as a sort of canon but absolutely horrendous) unless you completely ignore the other part and find a common time source to sync upon.

Zoom's latency isn't fixed, so that won't work. On the other hand, it is possible to do something like this over the internet by measuring latency and then adjusting for it: www.jefftk.com/p/bucket-brigade-singing

Re: An update on Android's audio latency

#150

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Mar 06, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #100

im3w1l wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caring is not a binary. A product has a much larger ongoing cost than low latency audio, so there is more of a reason to kill it.

Features require maintenance the same as products. If this feature is enough to go after entire new categories of customers, aka musicians, this feature effectively defines a new product opportunity for Google. Also Android is already buggy as fuck, so every new feature they add actually is a big deal. Ever since Google killed Reader I have no faith in them to ever maintain anything that isn't directly selling ads.

If they achieve a low audio latency, how much headcount do you think is needed to keep it low? A small fraction of an engineer, I suspect.