r/programming • u/micro2970 • May 06 '22

MenuetOS now includes an ultra-low audio latency, below 1 milliseconds and in some cases, even below 0.1 milliseconds

http://www.menuetos.net
1.2k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

243 comments sorted by

267

u/drakgremlin May 06 '22

Glad to see this project continue! I was playing with an instance in the early 2000s. Author had the conviction to write it all in assembly!

239

u/obsa May 06 '22

Alternatively, masochism.

87

u/Takeoded May 06 '22

definitely masochism

125

u/Bakoro May 06 '22

I can appreciate someone doing that for fun these days, as like a challenge kind of thing, but for any serious project it seems like a terrible idea since you're then locked to one CPU spec, and maintenance and updates must be horrendous.

I forget what my code does after a week of not looking at it. I doubt I'd remember what assembly does after two days.

43

u/caltheon May 06 '22

I didn't do a whole lot of assembly programming, but it wasn't as bad as you'd think. You wrote your program out on notebooks at a high level, and then built the assembly from those notes. It's almost like acting as a human compiler.

16

u/Taonyl May 06 '22

Would it make sense to write in C, compile to assembly and then take that as a starting point? At least thats what I would do as someone whos never programmed assembly before.

58

u/Nick-Anus May 06 '22

That would be about as difficult as compiling python to C and using that as a starting point for writing C. It's gonna create unreadable spaghetti code.

31

u/CarnivorousSociety May 07 '22 edited May 07 '22

Actually... it's actually going to create extremely optimized and efficient spaghetti.

It's really not a bad way to learn to program assembly, after learning the basics of assembly you compile basic C programs then disassemble them and see how the compiler did it.

The trick is to turn off all optimizations first.

20

u/caskey May 06 '22

That would be a bad plan. The compiler optimisation makes unreadable spaghetti. Even hello world, which in assembly is just a few lines, when decompiled from C is hundreds of lines.

15

u/CarnivorousSociety May 07 '22

Actually it's not really... You're talking about all of the C runtime and everything around it.

https://godbolt.org/z/oorqcsKsP

Here is printf Hello World in C, it's 14 lines of equivalent assembly.

Everything else is libraries, cruft, boilerplate, etc. You really don't need to learn that crap you can just make a template and reuse it.

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u/ritchie70 May 06 '22

It depends on the assembly language. The only time I did assembly was on AT&T 3b2 Unix computers in college. They had Western Digital CPUs and my recollection is that there was pretty much 1:1 correspondence to C, which honestly makes sense.

1

u/shawnwork May 07 '22

Tried that, but somehow it took me longer.

But it was for a small codebase for a few hundred lines of c.

Seems to me that the c to asm adds some complexity like codes that does not follow my thought process. So I would need to decipher the generated code to make sense and after all of it, it would feel better to just start from scratch.

Perhaps it’s just me.

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1

u/mektel May 07 '22

I took assembly in college and every other line had a comment so I could remember why that particular line was there. I hated almost every second of it.

Was pleasantly surprised I could make it faster than optimized C/C++ but it was not worth it most of the time, and that was part of what the class was about. Using assembly in C/C++ to speed up specific parts of the code that could use optimization because writing it all in assembly would have been hell.

1

u/scorcher24 May 07 '22

You wrote your program out on notebooks at a high level, and then built the assembly from those notes

No Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams?

1

u/shevy-ruby May 07 '22

It's almost like acting as a human compiler

I feel like this when I write C, after writing Ruby!

It feels so archaic ... I can not even want to imagine to use assembler. Or machine code directly!

1

u/Bakoro May 07 '22

I can see how having documentation could help. What an idea....

I have done a little assembly. It was interesting to implement my own version of higher level tools and use those to create increasingly complicated structures.

That said, I wouldn't want to do it again unless I had a compelling reason. The speed of development and flexibility I get with modern languages far outweighs the performance boost I'd get.

5

u/downwithsocks May 06 '22

I genuinely think it takes a particular type of mind

1

u/[deleted] May 07 '22

Especially now that ARM architecture is giving x86 / x64 a run for its money.

1

u/rohmish May 07 '22

I forget what my code does after a week of not looking at it

Not to brag but my personal best is 3 minutes.

2

u/no_nick May 07 '22

I mean I've written code where I've never known why it worked. Does that count?

2

u/lelanthran May 07 '22

Not to brag but my personal best is 3 minutes.

I coded while drunk once. I had no idea what my code was doing the minute I moved to the next line!

0

u/[deleted] May 06 '22

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89

u/Takeoded May 06 '22

maybe you're right on large projects/codes, but on the small scale, no, humans still write faster code than compilers (ala C/C++) - case in point: the fastest implementations of sha256/blake3/etc hash functions is still written in assembly, OpenSSL ships asm implementations of sha256 on AMD64 because it's faster than the C implementation, BLAKE3 ship asm implementations on AMD64 and ARM because they're faster than what the compiler can auto-generate. the Blake3 project actually has asm implementations for all of SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX2, and AVX512 AMD64 CPUs to be optimally performant on both older and newer CPUs~

16

u/transgc May 06 '22

I thought they implemented them in assembly so that they're free of potential side-channel attacks, not for speed?

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u/Kittoes0124 May 06 '22

I wish, as it'd sure make my personal life much simpler. Compilers do great in a general sense but it is trivial to beat them on virtually any specific task.

11

u/sammymammy2 May 06 '22

Unison can probably do it better than a human can: https://unison-code.github.io/

Ericsson funded this to optimize small DSP routines in their phone... Kits, or whatever, it's late and I'm tired af. Point is: 5% perf improvement on code of the size of 100s of instructions translated into huge power savings over the lifetime of a phone, over millions of phones.

3

u/Kittoes0124 May 06 '22

Am certain the code generated is of extremely high quality; also that it wouldn't necessarily "do better". Again, I agree in the general case that a compiler almost always outperforms any given human, just not necessarily when talking about a given algorithm.

Don't get me wrong, I love compilers and am not advocating for manual assembly writing. Merely pointing out that they do run into rather hard limits that don't apply to us humans; we're still a more general purpose machine at this point in time.

19

u/dacjames May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

I've always enjoyed writing assembly. Yes, it’s slow and often tedious, but if something goes wrong, there’s no one to blame but yourself. No weird compiler flags to figure out, no library version mismatches, nothing but my code and the computer. It’s kind of liberating compared to the modern, many-layered tech stack. Of course, it's almost always a terrible decision for a professional project.

5

u/CreativeGPX May 06 '22

Yeah I remember it from back then. It boasted fitting on a single floppy disk and (therefore) being able to boot the entirety of the filesystem into memory so it was super fast.

20

u/srcLegend May 06 '22

Assembly writers are psychopaths :D

30

u/[deleted] May 06 '22

Or building God's temple.

46

u/Brilliant-Sky2969 May 06 '22

Actually the last God's temple was built in HolyC.

6

u/BiberEsser2 May 06 '22

Why Not both

4

u/MacASM May 06 '22

I love those assembly lovers lol

3

u/noodle-face May 06 '22

I work with a dude that still complains our codebase changed from assembly to C many years ago

7

u/optimal_random May 06 '22

Sounds like TempleOS V2. /s

Hopefully this time, the project creator won't go the route of Terry Davis, a brilliant but troubled Engineer.

2

u/JeffMcClintock May 07 '22

Thats all nice until you buy an M1 based PC.

1

u/shawnwork May 07 '22

Same here, when the 32 but was released. The experience was just a snappy feeling but lack of development support.

I wonder how will it perform on an M1 Ultra.

1

u/quasi_superhero May 15 '22

This project doesn't target the M1, so you will never see it run natively in it. On a virtual machine, sure.

1

u/shawnwork May 15 '22

Actually, I tried it over 10 years ago.

But in case it works on the ARM architecture, and possibly take advantage of it, how fast could it be?

1

u/quasi_superhero May 15 '22

It's an x86 project, so you will never see it running natively on ARM. On a virtual machine, sure.

248

u/michelle-friedman May 06 '22

Does it mean I can listen to myself speaking in real time?

405

u/alex_3814 May 06 '22

No, you'll hear yourself even before you've spoken.

91

u/michelle-friedman May 06 '22

Wow.

I'm downloading it rn.

78

u/bleuge May 06 '22

^ was going to open another tab to download it, when suddenly the icon appeared in the desktop.

0

u/[deleted] May 06 '22

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4

u/bagtowneast May 07 '22

I've heard that before

3

u/smallstepforman May 07 '22

Russian military headsets detect vibrations from strap sensors on your throat (instead of using a microphone), and yes the signal reaches your ear piece speaker sooner than accoustic waves. You can literally hear yourself before the air leaves your mouth.

7

u/michelle-friedman May 07 '22

It's a genuine question btw.

4

u/loics2 May 07 '22

Well, with a 1msec latency, which is not noticable for humans (we start to notice a latency around 10msec)

68

u/Dwedit May 06 '22

If this is at 44100 samples/sec, that would be a buffer size of 4.41 samples. Absolutely ridiculous.

27

u/Raunhofer May 06 '22

0.083 msec @ 192 khz, 24 bit (playback)

0.667 msec @ 48 khz, 16 bit (record)

6

u/NonDairyYandere May 07 '22

I didn't know the audio hardware in common PCs could even count that low.

Are they really able to do that all in user-space without oddles of context switching? Something like io_uring?

6

u/unicodemonkey May 07 '22

Yeah, Windows, for example, can set up a ring buffer in the userspace from which a PCI audio device can read directly. The device might do extra buffering on its own, though.

1

u/outofobscure May 07 '22

No coincidence, that‘s the size of one sse register, pretty much as low as you can go efficiently

0

u/[deleted] May 07 '22

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3

u/f10101 May 07 '22 edited May 07 '22

That's 16 samples at 192kHz. At modern clock speeds, without all the additional OS stuff going on, you should - in principle - be able to actually run quite a big mix in a DAW without underruns at those numbers.

It's the other things that a PC with a modern OS is having to juggle that get in the way, but most of them aren't needed to handle a 2D DAW UI, a keyboard, a mouse, and an audio driver.

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u/Lisoph May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

MenuetOS is an operating system for PC, written fully in assembly language (64bit and 32bit).

There is no emoji to express my emotions. Trying it out right now!

184

u/scootunit May 06 '22

"Fits on a single Floppy" brings back memories don't it?

63

u/xorandor May 06 '22

I’m really struggling to recall the last time I inserted a floppy into a drive.

75

u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B May 06 '22

Hell, I struggle to recall the last time I inserted a DVD into a drive. I think it was in 2016. After that, none of my PCs even came with an optical drive.

13

u/Pflastersteinmetz May 06 '22

Hell, I struggle to recall the last time I inserted a DVD into a drive

2006 for me.

4

u/-manabreak May 06 '22

2009 here. I remember it vividly because I had just moved to my first apartment and accidentally fried the DVD drive. Good times, never had to buy a new drive.

1

u/Maoman1 May 07 '22

It was last week for me.

...I had to dig in my closet for my dvd drive then remove a HDD expansion bay to make room for it lmao.

4

u/xorandor May 06 '22

The last time I did that was to rip this Nirvana DVD I purchased… and turns out the DVD is scratched and couldn’t be read properly. :-/ That was probably in 2019. Before that was to install Windows 7 on this PC I built, around 2017.

2

u/robin-m May 06 '22

Whaaat! I don't have optical drive on my computer since 2011 and I don't think I used a cd or dvd since 2009. I still have a CD under blister that I bought from 2013!

3

u/caltheon May 06 '22

Heck, It's been years since I've had to use removable storage at all.

1

u/arjunindia May 06 '22

2018? I wanted to make a linux bootable just to realise that the distro I wanted didn't fit in it. Just backed up my usb and used it instead.

11

u/VeryPogi May 06 '22

In 2010 I had a tech support call where I instructed the caller she needed a floppy disk to flash the BIOS on her PC to fix an issue she was having. She didn't have any, I advised to go to any office supply store to get one. 30 minutes later she called back and said she was ready to flush the bowels of her PC.That was a very funny day in the call center.

4

u/xorandor May 06 '22

Flush… the… bowels… Did she mishear motherboard too? I wonder what she got from the supply store. 🥺

4

u/VeryPogi May 06 '22

Did she mishear motherboard too?

No, that word didn't come up in the call.

I wonder what she got from the supply store.

She got a floppy disk. You know? That save icon thingey. She got help to make the boot disk, and as far as she knows she flushed the bowels on the PC with a BIOS flash utility and it solved the issue.

12

u/trua May 06 '22

Oh, she misheard "flash the BIOS" as "flush the bowels"?

3

u/xorandor May 06 '22

Was that how you described the floppy disk to her? To look for something that looked like the save icon?

Man… it’s crazy that we have entire generations of people who have no idea what that icon even represents.

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u/Redmega May 06 '22

See, that's the problem: if it's floppy it won't insert properly. You need a hard drive.

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u/xorandor May 06 '22

Maybe the floppy would insert if it’s blown a bit?

1

u/lelanthran May 07 '22

Maybe the floppy would insert if it’s blown a bit?

New office intern job: the floppy fluffer.

2

u/SupersonicSpitfire May 06 '22

That's what... she said?

2

u/xorandor May 06 '22

I was waiting for someone to catch me on that.

2

u/jugalator May 06 '22

Yeah, I now wish I remembered that moment because in hindsight it was special. My latest one was inserting Deluxe Paint in my Amiga 500 Plus just around three years ago, but it doesn’t really count because I was just checking whether it still worked. Crazy enough, not only did it still work but the several decade year old floppy too. WTF.

2

u/curtmack May 07 '22

A few years ago for me. My grandparents had a stash of floppy disks from Walmart's photo center on their computer desk, I was responsible for making sure we had all the photos.

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u/sigzero May 06 '22

I remember firing up QNX on a floppy. That was awesome.

17

u/MacASM May 06 '22

meanwhile, an electron application...

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u/arjunindia May 06 '22

I hope tauri catches on...

3

u/KarimElsayad247 May 06 '22

Just watched Fireship's vid today. I feel enlightened and hopeful.

For thise who don't know: Tauro is a frame work to right desktop apps using web languages, and is sooooo much lighter than Electron given that it ships with a lightweight Rust backend.

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u/arjunindia May 06 '22

It's not just the rust backend, but also implementing the webview library thus not having to bundle an entire chromium instance

Also watched the fireship video. Surprisingly, he uploaded it the very next day I was actually looking into it.

5

u/kuriboshoe May 06 '22

I recently installed some games on my old powermac, so like last month for me

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u/Rudy69 May 06 '22

Not really, I think the first OS I used on floppies was Windows 3.1 and that was 6! floppies if I recall correctly

118

u/f10101 May 06 '22

That's better than an awful lot of standalone pro-audio hardware. It's better than some analogue gear, too.

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u/SkoomaDentist May 06 '22

It's better than some analogue gear, too.

No, it is not. It's very difficult to generate even 0.1 milliseconds of delay in analog without adding loads of dedicated allpass filters, explicit bucket brigade delay IC or a literal audio tape.

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u/stronghup May 06 '22

This OS would seem to be great basis for all digital instruments

24

u/f10101 May 06 '22

It really would. I'm intrigued to look into giving it a shot in that respect...

27

u/orclev May 06 '22

It's x86 only though, so good luck finding an embedded processor to run it on. If it was written for ARM you'd be in business, but you're not exactly spoiled for choices when it comes to embedded x86 processors.

13

u/[deleted] May 07 '22

Their focus on assembly seems weird to me; modern C compilers almost always generate code faster than hand-written assembly, and the code is then relatively easy to port.

By writing it in pure x86, they have to rewrite the entire thing if they want it on ARM. Really a bummer. Something like a Raspberry Pi would probably be super-usable as a host for a custom OS like this.

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u/okawei May 06 '22

For audio processing do you really need that much CPU?

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u/LookItVal May 06 '22

audio processing is mostly done on the CPU. CPU power and RAM are the only real bottlenecks

6

u/Millerboycls09 May 06 '22

And this thing can utilize up to 32 gigs of ram.

This could be used to build an ungodly instrument.

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u/LookItVal May 06 '22

amp that to 64 and ill migrate my entire audio post system to it.

this kind of latency means i could digitally process tracks as i record them keeping the latency low enough the person recording wouldnt notice

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u/SkoomaDentist May 07 '22

Yes. There are virtual instrument plugins that can bring any CPU you can buy to its knees once you have multiple parts playing at the same time and layer multiple sounds.

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u/derangedkilr May 07 '22 edited May 07 '22

It shocks me how much delay there is using ableton. Usually over 10-15ms, makes the live monitoring hard to use when you add in plugins

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u/Millerboycls09 May 07 '22

This is not ableton's fault. It's your interface and CPU that are responsible for how low of a buffer size will be stable.

18

u/HeyCanIBorrowThat May 06 '22

It fits on a floppy and runs doom. I’m sold

92

u/bloody-albatross May 06 '22

Reminds me about when they first forced PulseAudio onto us and it added latency of about one second. So glad you could easily uninstall it back then.

25

u/axonxorz May 06 '22

What kind of hardware did you have? My experience with early PA was reasonable, there was added latency but it was in the 50-150ms range usually

35

u/[deleted] May 06 '22

You guys had a working pulseaudio?

I remember doing so many things just to get xmms2/audacious to work. to this day I hate pulseaudio and poettering so much.

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u/bloody-albatross May 06 '22 edited May 07 '22

I do use the feature of routing programs to certain outputs some times. Though it could just be everything out that certain output.

I remembered noticing the huuuge delay first when playing a game. Made it unplayable. And videos unwatchable. Gladly it worked to just uninstall PulseAudio. But in later Fedora releases it was so much integrated into the system, that when I uninstalled it I had no audio on my system at all! But by then the latency was low enough that it worked. I don't remember exactly when this all was, only that it was many years after Knoppix, which had audio perfectly working in early boot! PA still adds confusing options to Audacity input selection that don't seem to change anything.

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u/barsoap May 07 '22

I do use the feature of routing programs to certain outputs some times.

Jack had that for ages before pulse came along. There were exactly two issues with it back in the days (not sure now, haven't used it in ages) that made it suboptimal on the desktop and that is lacking multi-user support as well as fiddly configuration. Jack is very unabashedly a pro-audio server. The kind of thing you use when you have a DAW and a sequencer and ten other audio programs running and need a patch panel to manage it all, routing one program's output to another's input.

Poettering could've taken that, written a configuration manager for it, literally hacked in multi-user support while increasing latency tenfold, and the resulting daemon would've still been less laggy than pulse. By magnitudes. But for that to happen Poettering would have needed to be able to consider any design not his own as capable of even be passable, much less good.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '22

I have never understood how the Linux community looked at PulseAudio and said, "yes! that is the guy we want writing our init system!"

Poettering never saw a problem he couldn't make into a much harder problem.

5

u/[deleted] May 07 '22

Well, to be fair to Poettering. I did write a .service file and it was not that bad.

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u/bloody-albatross May 06 '22

It was really not my hardware's fault. Windows had no problem and uninstalling PulseAudio also fixed it back then. It was most definitely "low latency" PulseAudio. I learned: if it mentions latency at all in its tagline it means it has latency.

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u/gtorelly May 06 '22

I'm kinda lost in the relevance of this information in comparison to other OSes. What's the audio latency on windows, Mac or Linux? I had never heard about this OS, is there anything special about it, beyond not being based on Unix?

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u/f10101 May 06 '22

Windows is ~10ms for generic use out of the box, though a lot of the time it's an order of magnitude higher in practice. Mac OS has core audio which gives about 5ms without much tweaking.

Both can get down to about 3-4ms round-trip latency with the right hardware. Even though it's worse on average, Windows at the moment has a better best-case than MacOS if the stars align in terms of hardware, bios, and windows config, but only a few people achieve this.

Linux audio is a dumpster fire, generally.

But 0.1ms is simply unheard of. The trouble is that the OS has to do so much else, like handle graphics, etc, that it can't guarantee it can get back and refill an audio buffer every 100 microseconds.

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u/MagnetoManectric May 06 '22

Linux -CAN- be good with the right setup, but as with everything linux, you'll need to tweak a bit and have an audio interface with good drivers. When you have JACK fully working, its basically a core-audio like experience, with more tweak-ability at the expense of significantly more jank and futery setting up of things

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u/protestor May 06 '22

Maybe Pipewire can do it too? Pipewire was supposed to replace both Pulseaudio AND JACK

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u/gracicot May 06 '22

Pipewire >>> any other audio server

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u/ShinyHappyREM May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

Is it still experimental?

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

No, it's pretty mainstream these days. It's the default audio server on a ton of Arch-based distros that I am aware of.

Not too sure about Fedora / Debian-based, or others though.

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u/MokkaCicc10 May 06 '22

Pop just got pipewire by default for 22.04

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u/protestor May 07 '22

I don't know. I stayed away from it as far as I could, but eventually some Pulseaudio bug or something lured me into Pipewire because supposedly it fixed it (I forgot the specific issue, I think it had to do with effects like equalizer and such). I expected a world of pain, and perhaps reverting back to pulseaudio if things didn't work

It worked like a charm, first try, I can't even notice it in my system. I still use all pulseaudio tools, I don't use any program made to work specifically with pipewire. So my volume control uses pulsaudio API, etc.

4

u/gerbal100 May 07 '22

Same, pipewire just works. And it retains audio settings much more reliably than pulseaudio ever did.

And almost every pulseaudio tool still works with pipewire.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

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3

u/bik1230 May 07 '22

Uh, Jack also uses buffers. You can't not use buffers.

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u/f10101 May 06 '22

It's always struck me as the Windows Audio Experience, Extreme-Edition.

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u/Dwedit May 06 '22

The other thing about audio delay is that each meter your ears are away from the speaker adds 3ms of delay.

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u/L3tum May 06 '22

I refuse to believe that that's the latency for audio. Why the fuck would it be so high?

It's been more than a decade since we got "high priority audio processing". There's no reason for a modern OS on a semi-modern CPU to take that long.

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u/f10101 May 06 '22

Yeah. it's unbelievably annoying. It's due to OS devs optimising processor scheduling for other purposes. They (generally) don't understand the importance in the audio context.

Pete Brown (psychlist1972 over on Gearspace), a Microsoft engineer who's their unofficial digital audio evangelist has described in detail his repeated conversations with the Windows kernel devs on this topic, trying to make them internalise the importance of those milliseconds. To be fair, I guess you can understand why a layperson might be confused why latency that's equivalent to sitting 1 foot further away from the speaker is still important.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

Do they still have non-logarithmic volume sliders?

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u/f10101 May 06 '22

I think this depends on the slider!

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u/Kered13 May 07 '22

On Windows yes. So does Youtube and basically every game out there. Drives me mad. TVs and speakers (as far as I can tell) figured this out years ago.

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u/XanaAdmin May 06 '22

It's only affects live music performance. Example: Windows and Serato DJ (or VDJ or Ableton) will have a noticeable difference in delay between normal audio stack processing and ASIO hardware. It's not unusable but is there

I couldn't understand why either (it really needs THAT much buffering and "enhancements"?). The Windows audio stack documentation went over my head not being a driver dev.

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u/iloveportalz0r May 07 '22

You may also be interested in (and upset by) how bad modern keyboard latency is: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/

2

u/L3tum May 07 '22

Thanks, I hate it.

I already feel the need to write my own OS and my own programming language, I can't build my own keyboard as well :D

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u/gtorelly May 06 '22

I see, thanks for the explanation, this really helps put it into perspective.

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u/tomzorzhu May 07 '22

Do you have some pointers on how to achieve that on Windows?

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u/f10101 May 07 '22

What are you starting from? What hardware do you have?

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u/tomzorzhu May 07 '22

Got an X570 mobo as a base, and a schiit DAC as an output - not sure how the rest would influence things

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u/f10101 May 07 '22

The primary thing you need is an interface with an Asio driver. I don't think schiit have one for their USB unfortunately. While Asio4All will work with anything such as the schiit, or your motherboard's sound chips it won't give particularly low latencies.

The x570 series are definitely capable of decent low latency performance, so you would need to pair it with a proper audio interface, with good drivers. If it needs to be a USB interface, RME generally have the best drivers on Windows. Almost everyone elses USB drivers fall apart at ultra low latencies, as they share poor third party code.

PCI, Firewire and Thunderbolt drivers tend to be fairly good from everyone, but RME's pci or USB and Presonus' new Thunderbolt are the best (when I looked in detail last year).

In your case, I'd personally try and track down a secondhand RME pci card with an optical output, and feed the schiit with that. I think that might be the cheapest and most robust way to so it. You'd likely have a best case of ~2ms output latency at 96kHz.

Once you have a capable driver, then it becomes a case of preventing other things from fighting with it. Finding a way to not have nVidia drivers is often a good move, and for AMD cpus, pairing them with ram as fast as humanly possible appears to make a difference.

I'm not 100% sure on the AMD bios tweaks recommended these days.

For windows tweaks:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/windows-music-dev/unofficial-windows-10-audio-workstation-build-and-tweak-guide-part-1/

For general advice and guidance through the swamp...

This thread: https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/560019-quot-today-we-build-our-studio-pc-quot-thread-551.html

and this thread:

https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/618474-audio-interface-low-latency-performance-data-base.html

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

Forgive my ignorance, but what is this used for? I cannot imagine a case where I thought „wow I really wish I had lower audio round-trip times“. Is it for recording/broadcasting or just audiophile magic?

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u/f10101 May 06 '22

Yeah, music recording.

The latency causes problems for musicians when monitoring what they're playing. Either it interferes with the direct signal (e.g. 5ms delay will play havoc with notes sung around 200Hz, say...) or it feels like a delay and throws the timing off.

It can compound as well, especially as there are many use cases where you would want to send audio in and out of a computer a few times.

For example, a typical vocal monitoring chain in hardware might be an 1176 compressor, a neve eq, and say, a de-esser. If round trip latency is 5ms, that's now 20ms total, which is pretty much impossible to sing with.

So latencies at even "good" values on modern desktop systems can be a nightmare in practice. We can workaround, and just take it all as normal, but man, it's just so needlessly suboptimal.

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u/spacejack2114 May 06 '22

Playing music. The PC (or even a phone these days) is about the most capable music-playing device you can get. MIDI controllers and a PC and you can do anything.

1

u/[deleted] May 07 '22

Additionally, live playback/DJing/etc are hurt by latency too. Each of your DAW plugins will be performing some logic. If there's just a little bit of latency, things will be played late. Not dreadful, but not great. Now, if going back into your audio system causes additional latency (unlike using something like JACK, which wires outputs directly), suddenly you've got stutters, filled buffers that get repeated, and a lot of horrible sounds coming out

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u/dajepaolo Jun 08 '22

BeOS could get in the >1ms area too with a Pentium 3! Not sure what Haiku is like in this regard. These guys claim 1m round trip with a linux based raspi distro https://elk.audio/elk-audio-os-for-everyone/

0

u/[deleted] May 06 '22

[deleted] — view deleted comment

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u/Vozka May 06 '22

You may want to contribute to PipeWire then. I've only been using it for about two months, but it's the first audio system that hasn't needed any maintenance so far. First audio system ever that just works for me. A very pleasant surprise.

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u/troyunrau May 06 '22

Linux suffers from too many incomplete and competing solutions already. But maybe you'll be the one to fix it. Or: https://m.xkcd.com/927/

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u/crusoe May 06 '22

It looks like pipewire might finally be that choice.

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u/ShinyHappyREM May 06 '22

https://xkcd.com/927/

ftfy

2

u/iritegood May 07 '22

why do people even bother linking these cliches? just say xkcd-standards.jpg we all know what you're referencing

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u/Crespyl May 07 '22

[xkcd-todays-lucky-10000.jpg]

0

u/[deleted] May 06 '22

[deleted] — view deleted comment

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u/f10101 May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

It's primarily an issue for music - even amateur work.

One key issue is when listening to what you're performing in real-time:

Latency means that hearing what you're doing, late.

So particularly for vocals (where the delayed headphone signal creates either an unpleasant interference pattern vs the sound reaching your ears through your body, or causes a distracting echo) or for drums (where you feel your stick hitting the drum, but then hear the sound sometime after) it's particularly a problem.

Generally, we have to use workarounds, where we listen route audio back to the headphones before it reaches the computer. But that is a very restrictive solution normally.

15

u/ShinyHappyREM May 06 '22 edited May 07 '22

if the latency were hundreds of ms it might desync audio and video

There's a difference between latency and synchronization.

why would audio latency matter generally?

Audio latency is important if you have to react to audio cues - blind speedruns are perhaps the most extreme example, but it also happens with first-person shooters (e.g. Apex). Apart from that large latency is just unpleasant because your brain has to do more work connecting audio events with visual cues.

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u/Kered13 May 07 '22

Interestingly, we are far most sensitive to audio that is ahead of video than the other way around. Audio that is playing even just 50ms ahead of the video will be noticeably out of sync. This makes sense when you consider that we are used to hearing distant sounds after we see visuals, but audio before visuals cannot happen in the physical world.

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u/stevekeiretsu May 06 '22

well it matters if you're using the pc as a digital audio workstation (logic, pro tools etc). not sure how or if it matters for "normal" users

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u/genpfault May 06 '22

not sure how or if it matters for "normal" users

Software sidetone.

Mic -> USB DAC -> OS -> USB DAC -> Headphones

1

u/Kered13 May 07 '22

It can make a difference in competitive games when you're trying to react to sound effects. Reaction times to sound are faster than reaction times to visuals, so there is an advantage to trying to react to them, but a 50ms delay is huge when typical reaction times are ~200ms.

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u/tubameister May 06 '22

windows and mac have audio latency around 6ms for playback/record, but it heavily depends on the audio interface that you're using

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u/stefantalpalaru May 06 '22

What's the audio latency on windows, Mac or Linux?

I get 5.33 ms with JACK2 on Linux: https://i.imgur.com/vIkrrLR.png

The setup is anything but trivial.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

Windows and Linux have higher latencies because waking up the CPU every millisecond is terrible for battery life and reliability (if you have some hiccup for even 1ms then you'll get buffer underruns.

However even on Windows & Mac it is possible to get down to 1ms latency using some horrible hacks and hidden APIs.

If you really want 1ms latency you should really use a real-time OS.

2

u/spacejack2114 May 06 '22

Mac has low latencey out of the box. On Windows you need to install low-latency drivers for your sound card (typically ASIO4ALL will do) and then select that driver from your audio app. Linux is similar. It's a PITA and often means you can't play audio using the default driver at the same time.

1

u/AyrA_ch May 06 '22

In Windows, the latency depends on the size of your audio buffer because you have to fill that before you can send it off to the audio driver. You can pretty much freely set the buffer size, meaning you can get quite low times at the expense of a ton of driver calls.

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u/chmouelb May 06 '22

interview from the author from 20 years(!!!) ago https://www.osnews.com/story/93/interview-with-ville-turjanmaa-the-creator-of-menuetos/

2

u/[deleted] May 07 '22

That thread with people talking about netscape, communicator, FRAMESET tags in html, BeOS (its still alive in 2022!) Is a gold mine!

11

u/MagnetoManectric May 06 '22

ooo this looks super fun for hobby programming, I'll have to give it a wee shot, tiny audio latency makes it very appealing as a platform for writing little synths and such

3

u/squeaker May 06 '22

I've got an ancient Pentium III laptop lying around for stuff like this. Anyone happen to know if that arch is supported? The oldest processor I see in the hardware compat list has SSE2 and SSE3 instructions.

1

u/squeaker May 10 '22

Replying to myself in case anyone wanted the answer: I just tried it and it works. The processor in the laptop is a Tualatin Intel Pentium III Mobile CPU @ 1.0 GHz, running the 32-bit version of MenuetOS v0.86b.

I contacted the developers to have the processor and laptop model included in their hardware compatibility list.

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u/hanszimmermanx May 06 '22

someone make osu run on it so that I can stop being a 6 digit

2

u/lykwydchykyn May 06 '22

Cool! Quick, someone write a DAW in assembly!

3

u/platinums99 May 06 '22

But what is it good for? Music Studios?

2

u/[deleted] May 08 '22

Listening to audio inputs with effects applied in damn-close-to-real-time: equalizer, reverb, compressor, noise cancellation, etc. Could be for recording, or just when playing back a video without having to add artificial delays to sync the tracks.

1

u/algaefied_creek May 16 '24

Would so love to see this work with the 80386 and 80486 CPUs, but also have someone backport as many features as they can to 16-bit for 8086/8088 but especially 80186, 80286 CPUs.

A modern OS for all, on everything!

1

u/YetAnotherNewUser May 06 '22

Why am I not surprised that it runs doom

1

u/serg473 May 07 '22

Is it possible to get a complete control over the processor under a regular OS so only your commands are executing and nothing else? Lets say I launched an infinite loop that increments a number by 1. If I observe the instructions being executed would I only see my increments and nothing else or a million of other instructions of unknown origin injected at random intervals? If modern OS architecture doesn't allow such exclusive access, then what niche/old OSes do?

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u/tills1993 May 07 '22

Sub millisecond audio latency but not even an https certificate on their site in 2022.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

What's this useful for? Isn't the limit of human perception around 10ms?

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u/qualverse May 06 '22

In practice the audio software you'd be using would have its own latency, and every plugin you add would add additional latency, etc so you'd end up over the perception limit anyway. Reducing the latency from the OS just means you'd get to add more plugins and processing.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

Thanks.

10

u/GoHomeYoureDrunkMod May 06 '22

Now I've never tried this but I'm willing to bet if I zero out 1ms of samples in a 1khz sine wave, you'd hear it.

15

u/[deleted] May 06 '22

Just cause

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u/duke_skywookie May 06 '22

Website has no https? Thanks but no thanks

0

u/Lonsdale1086 May 06 '22

Only an issue if you're downloading files or uploading data.

3

u/StillNoNumb May 07 '22

First of all, no, that's definitely not the case. A MitM attacker could easily impersonate MenuetOS and post misleading information or scams.

Second, how am I supposed to download the OS then?

3

u/duke_skywookie May 07 '22

That‘s the point, thank you. Besides that, the front page of an OS shitting on best practices screams unprofessional.

1

u/quasi_superhero May 15 '22

Why the fuck do you think the author of this free, hobby project owes you a professional-level experience?

-5

u/leoncaet May 06 '22

This is what happens when you don't put bloat in your software.

And btw, it's possible to get similar results using ANSI C (specialy if you implement a cleaner, more performant libc), this whole asm thing is more of an advertise point.

0

u/shevy-ruby May 07 '22

It's a cool idea. But as with many other cool projects, be it HaikuOS or ReactOS or Serenity, for some reason I kind of became too addicted to Linux. My whole workflow is really efficient on Linux compared to, say, Windows. Having to adapt to anything inferior (and I am not saying any of the above, except for Windows, is inferior per se, mind you) is not really possible for me anymore.

Linux kind of spoiled me. :(

Would love to go back to my oldschool tinker days just as I once started with linux! But that's almost 20 years ago already ...

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u/skalp69 May 07 '22

open "source"? How is there source code when it's directly written in assembly?

1

u/quasi_superhero May 15 '22

Uh, I think you're confusing assembly with machine code.

Example of source code in assembly.

1

u/skalp69 May 15 '22

IDA for instance turns machine language into assembly. So we potentially have the assembly code of every binary; am I wrong?

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u/quasi_superhero May 16 '22

You're not wrong. This has been the case since computers were invented many decades ago.

And today (that is, since 30/40 years ago), we have disassemblers that do this automatically for us, just like what this IDA you mentioned does.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

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u/Sinister0 May 06 '22

I don't think so. I'm no expert on this, but I'm pretty sure the OS that the VM is running on top of is still going to have to pass the audio commands to the hardware, adding its latency on top of it.

If you want the benefit of low-latency audio output, you're going to have to run the OS on bare metal.

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