Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharpneli | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with the general idea. Bloat is too high and has far reaching consequences.

And it's actually even worse than that. 100ms is nowhere near enough to be sufficient for all applications.

For audio applications you need 10ms [http://superpowered.com/androidaudiopathlatency] which incidentally is the reason why Android is unusable for any interactive audio applications.

Same applies to Virtual Reality. You need sub 20ms latency for head tracking to eyes latency or you will feel sick (effectively less than 10ms from the cpu side. Display scanning is summed on top).

The 100ms figure applies mostly to traditional UI workflow. Whenever you need a realtime interaction that's 10x too high.

View on HN

> which incidentally is the reason why Android is unusable for any interactive audio applications.

Everybody says this and yet programs like Caustic seem to do a fine job in my experience.

Have you tried performing using an android app? I used a drum-pad app the other week and the latency makes it unplayable.

There's a great explanation here as to why it's so bad: http://superpowered.com/androidaudiopathlatency

This is fixed in newer Android phones: https://source.android.com/devices/audio/latency_measurement...

That's a relief. They are finally taking the issue seriously then.

There are also indications that they are going to lower the display path latency, which also stands several times higher than what is in iDevices. It just takes some time to get a certain class of software architects to realize that buffering a frame several times each step might not be the smartest way after all.

That's awesome to hear, I just got a new phone so I'm going to try this out :)

> which incidentally is the reason why Android is unusable for any interactive audio applications.

Strange. The primary use of my (Android) phone is interactive audio. I do not recognize latency as an issue.

I'm glad you posted this. Even the 10ms rule of thumb is...well, not always true either!

FWIW, if you are playing virtual drums, drummers need something like under 2ms response time; even 10ms can be easily felt by a drummer and cause their timing to get way off!

On top of that, if you are doing, say, a real-time effect on a vocal track, even a tiny sub 1ms delay causes a weird reverb effect in her monitor vs. the singer hearing herself, which will cause your singer's singing to get out of sync!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com