Comment by sharpneli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharpneli | Hacker News Reader

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I bet macOS audio API's are way better than on Windows. I don't have experience of them myself but I have been burned by Windows ones.

I have a small story to tell about this. Windows WASAPI has a way for it to tell you when, supposedly, the endpoint device started the recoding of a buffer. This is important if one wants to have a sync with precision of sub millisecond range.

Well. It doesn't quite work like that in reality. I noticed the hard way that if one gets a 2ms long packet. Queries the high performance timestamp, then queries the packet recording time, then queries the timestamp again. The packet was supposedly recorded after the first timestamp but before the next. And as the packet was 2ms long and the previous timestamp was way way way less than 2ms from the query it means that it was impossible for it to start the capture at that point.

So instead of returning the start of the recording as per docs state WASAPI just returned the current high precision timestamp. It's basically you asking someone "Hey, this 10 hour video you gave me, when did you actually start recording it?" "Now. I started the recording right at this moment".

This story has a happy ending though. I grabbed portaudio, hacked it's windows low level implementation to return the actual timestamp based on the register of the soundcard that points to the FIFO buffer and managed to get sub ms precision.

So if macOS audio API's are as good compared to Windows (which is a dumpster fire unless one uses some custom stuff dependent on manufacturer) as iOS api's are compared to Android (where only Pixel phones are not dumpster fires) I can easily see why Macs are the devices of choice.

Nothing about windows audio APIs actually stops them being good enough to do a production on.

Obviously it's not Broadway but I ran the sound for school productions for years, and we were able to quite happily do (increasingly DSP based as the years went on) live audio I/O on literally the worst windows machines you could imagine.

The whole idea that the OS really makes any difference - especially for being "creative" is just a placebo.

On a conceptual level they seem allright. The downside is that they don’t actually work as documented.

If Mac APIs actually work as advertised then the difference is that windows programs work weirdly (bad sync etc) or have had to spend tons of time making custom code to workaround the badness of their ”professional” audio API, costing way more.

And another example is Android. It’s definitely not placebo that it tends to have horrendous latency. Originally due to design and nowadays due to bad vendor implementations with only Pixel phones reaching iPhone levels of latency. We’re talking about latency in iPhones being only few ms and tens of ms or even more in average android phone. That does actually matter in music production.

Mac APIs have indeed worked as advertised for many years.

My own concern is watching Apple pursue a path of driving upgrade purchases through (A) increased performance and (B) breaking older systems or (C) disqualifying them from use of current software.

C is easy and practiced intensely by Apple, which abandons support for older stuff VERY REGULARLY in XCode. This may or may not be better than allowing it to rot and become deeply broken through lack of maintenance, but it's a choice and Apple repeatedly chooses to throw away even the possibility to support older machines.

B happens through rot: things get complicated, and if they don't care what happens to you AND they are changing your machine out from under you, they can just randomly brick it one day and not be a bit sad about it. It was your fault for not buying newer things, regularly.

A is also something Apple's been capable of. You buy into that and if you stay on the bleeding edge, Apple's become pretty good at keeping you riding that wave of the best computers can do, at any given moment. This also (to some extent) helps the older stuff become more affordable as it's left behind: that's positive in its way. 'Bleeding edge' is not the only kind of functionality to have. I've noticed that for music production testing of Apple Silicon, all the test cases are completely unrealistic: 4000 tracks each of which has 10 Space Designers, etc etc. That means the use case is a solved problem: you don't need the new Mac to do it, at any reasonable level. 8K feature film video on the desktop, yeah you can still need bleeding edge for that. Music, no, not at all.

This is also why it's important that Apple not break its own APIs or let them rot. On the whole, the functionality just works, every time, no matter what. This is a serious thing to risk by allowing the platform to become less reliable due to needing to 'churn' it and sell new generations of machines.

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