planet-h wrote:Thanks for the info, dag.
As you surely expect, I'm informed about the Superpowered Audio API.
Superpowered is great if you want to create a cross-platform app (which GSS clearly isn't), since it comes with the same API for Android, IOS and more.
But they do not at all anything special or anything magic. They just abstract and encapsulate the complexity of the internal audio system setup (OpenSL for example).
As mentioned in my other thread on this, this is a new (Android specific) development and not about their cross-platform Audio API.
The reason why they lately brought the latency down is that they now code against Android N (7.0). And keep in mind that the low latency you've mentioned can be achieved on 2 devices worldwide, the Nexus 9 and the Nexus 6p, since these are the only ones that support the Pro Audio flag in Android N.
I haven't seen tests on Android N. The Pro flag is new in Android 6, which is where we see the first bump. The second bump is brought by their new media server, not available in any standard Android.
Also, this reduction of the latency does not only apply to Superpowered, it applies to any app that has a low latency audio system integrated.
True about the Pro flag, in deed. The further halving of the latency does depend on the app using the new Superpowered Android media server, though.
On a Nexus 9, G-Stomper runs smooth at an internal latency of 2.5-3ms (the Nexus 6p has similar results). Of course that's not the whole thing, there's touch screen latency, post processing (for the speakers) latency and more. But also Superpowered has that problem.
Yes, internal latency can be quite far from real measured round-trip latency, though. As I understand it, it's really a measurement of number of buffers and their size?
Bottom line:
Achieving low latency on Nexus devices is nothing new, independent if you use Superpowered or not, because these devices have been built for that.
No other device models will achieve these low latency at the moment (with or without Superpowered).
Again, the point here is that they've built a completely new audio path, side-stepping the normal libraries and services, using a polling method instead of push, and achieving much lower latency regardless of device. Yes, the final latency will still depend greatly on the device, but it may well still be halved compared to before.
However, I fully respect the effort of Superpowered, and I'm sure many devs will be happy with it.
The only thing I really don't like about it, is their non-transparent pricing model. They give it for free for new apps, but once you have reached some threshold number of installs installs, they start to charge you. How much that will be, is not clearly specified, they can factually charge whatever they want (correct me if I'm wrong, maybe they changed that meanwhile). I'd much prefer to pay a one time fee per app, independent of the number of installs.
Did not know that. I was suspicious about Superpowered but they seemed legit and respected enough at a glance. Perhaps still are, but I agree about a need for (and apparent lack of) cost transparency.
As mentioned already in some other topic, Google anyway works on an out-of-the-box solution, which hopefully will be finished with Android 8.0 in 2017.
That's great news! I watched an I/O talk from 2016 about pro audio and didn't hear any plans that specific? They seem to mostly have been, and continuing to, fixing many small issues here and there and generally improving the results but still sticking to the same broken-at-the-core technologies that date back from the earliest days of even pre-Google Android.
Cire86 wrote:As a nexus9 user i can confirm the low latency on it still on android 5.0.1 since performance problems with marshmallow and trust me playing live audio on this device is absolutely wonderfull i never had any problem in any audio creation app recording my beats life you realy dont feel this small latency so if you realy care that much about latency, get one you wont be dissapointed
I bought a used Nexus 9 recently due to all the praise it gets and I had some issues on Android 5, in part with the OS itself (automatic brightness and screen rotation) but also with audio apps like DRC (where MIDI just crashed the app) so I upgraded to Android 6 and had an awful time with OpenSL in G-Stomper (crackling audio and glitchy sound) although AudioTrack worked fine (but with noticeable latency). It's running very well on Android 7 now, though. The developer preview also runs very well itself, doesn't feel like a beta in my experience so far. I think it's also the last beta version before the public release anyway, so.