Lessons learnt building a real-time audio application in Python • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons learnt building a real-time audio application in Python

#31

Post by abdulhaq » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #29

camtarn wrote: post #2

"It turns out that the round-trip time from an audio interface, through a computer (DAW) and back to the speakers takes a few hundreds of milliseconds, making direct audio processing impossible using consumer hardware." - uh, what? Real-time audio processing has been a thing for at least a couple of decades. It doesn't work by default on Windows, but you can get free drivers (ASIO4All) which make it work on pretty mu…

The damage that Python not having a JIT has done. At least BASIC was designed for native code compilation from day one, and after the 8 bit home computers generation passed by, getting compilers for 16 bit home computers was rather easy. 30 years later, people insist in using bytecode interpreted language for the wrong use cases.

What about psyco? Anyway it's a very odd take that the early development of python should have been concerned with a jit. There were many far more pressing issues at the time.

Re: Lessons learnt building a real-time audio application in Python

#32

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

abdulhaq wrote: post #31

pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The damage that Python not having a JIT has done. At least BASIC was designed for native code compilation from day one, and after the 8 bit home computers generation passed by, getting compilers for 16 bit home computers was rather easy. 30 years later, people insist in using bytecode interpreted language for the wrong use cases.

What about psyco? Anyway it's a very odd take that the early development of python should have been concerned with a jit. There were many far more pressing issues at the time.

Python exists for 33 years....

Re: Lessons learnt building a real-time audio application in Python

#33

Post by abdulhaq » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 6:23 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #32

abdulhaq wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about psyco? Anyway it's a very odd take that the early development of python should have been concerned with a jit. There were many far more pressing issues at the time.

Python exists for 33 years....

Yes and I've been using it for a lot of that time. Maybe you too. At the time tools like psyco were useful but never got enough traction to persuade core developers that it was a compelling direction. It never felt like an obviously wrong decision.

Re: Lessons learnt building a real-time audio application in Python

#34

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Sep 10, 2024, 6:42 PM UTC

abdulhaq wrote: post #33

pjmlp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python exists for 33 years....

Yes and I've been using it for a lot of that time. Maybe you too. At the time tools like psyco were useful but never got enough traction to persuade core developers that it was a compelling direction. It never felt like an obviously wrong decision.

I only use it as Perl alternative for UNIX scripts, nothing else, unless forced otherwise.

There are enough alternatives with the same dynamism and native code generation.

Re: Lessons learnt building a real-time audio application in Python

#35

Post by emptiestplace » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 9:04 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #19

PhunkyPhil wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. In Ableton on Windows you can get your latency down to ~40ms without a dedicated sound card using ASIO. Mac's drivers are even better with sub ~20 ms on my m2 pro IIRC.

> Mac's drivers are even better with sub ~20 ms on my m2 pro IIRC. Just to be clear that you're measuring apples to apples with OP: You are measuring less than 40ms roundtrip latency on your Mac. Is this correct?

You seem surprised, but any sort of live production requires this. Check out SonoBus, it achieves adequately low end-to-end latency even with network delays in the mix.