Android latency sucks

[Jay Vaughan]

> On Wednesday, December 07, 2011 11:55:30 PM Jay Vaughan wrote:
>> No, audio really does suck on Android.  
> So I gather that means games suck on Android as well?
> 

No, I wouldn't say that - streaming audio is acceptable, really, but generating audio on Android is where the problem lays .. for simple playback, okay, Android has 'okay' results - things do lag sometimes, but most Android users get used to it (garbage collection is a damned nuisance anyway) and things are definitely playable.

Just, when it comes to generating audio (synthesis) or processing audio i/o (effects), nothing comes quite so close to the results you can achieve, developer-wise, with iOS - which has CoreAudio and is therefore damned good.

Windows 8, also, btw, has a solid architecture for audio.  Whereas on Android, its all been sort of tacked on as an afterthought - even using the NDK for doing audio (from C/native code) is laggy as all hell, simply because the original Android design for the audio subsystem didn't take into account that people would be using phones/tablets for such things.  

I believe this will get addressed some time in the near future, though - there has been quite a furor over audio (as well as the GUI thread) on Android recently, and Google seem to at least be noticing the noise.


;
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Jay Vaughan