so what i'm really suggesting to "fix" the timestamps in [packOSC] is to use logical time for *advancing time* (and add some offset to put the timestamps into the same calendar as NTP)

In Pd there is another issue with advancing by logical time: Pd has very relaxed realtime-safety constraints and it is very common to occasionally drop some audio blocks, e.g. when opening a large patch or loading a large soundfile. Naturally, the logical time does not advance while Pd blocks, so your timestamps will be late forever.

FWIW, here's my current approach to scheduling/dispatching OSC bundles in Pd (for the next AOO release):

1) sample the system time *once* per DSP block

2) filter the time with a DLL to get rid of jitter

3) check for dropped audio blocks and resync the time base. This is hard to do in a plugin. The best solution I've come up with so far is to average the last few delta times and check if it rises above a certain threshold.

All of this steps wouldn't be necessary if Pd would

1) give access to the (estimated) system time of the current DSP tick

2) resync the system time and send a notification (e.g. a message to "pd") when the polling scheduler has to drop a block of audio

There's still a potential problem with xruns in the audio driver. Jack has a xrun callback (https://jackaudio.org/api/group__ClientCallbacks.html#ga08196c75f06d9e68f9a3570dfcb1e323). Portaudio has input/output overflow/underflow flags that are passed to the stream callback, but it's up to the audio driver to actually provide this information. I've read somewhere that many ASIO drivers don't do this...

Christof

On 4/18/21 10:32 PM, IOhannes m zmölnig wrote:

i checked and double checked the specs but could not find anything about this.
where do you get the idea that the OSC specs mandate wall clock time?
OSC-1.0 speaks about "NTP format" (but this is just the structure of the 64 bits data chunk) and "the number of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1900" (but it doesn't say whether this is supposed to be wallclock or idealized)

i just thought that maybe we are really talking about different things here.

so i'd like to clarify what I mean by "logical time".

Pd keeps an track of an internal monotonic value "pd_systime" that is incremented whenever time advances within the Pd world.
the incrementation of this value is losely synched to the passing of time in the real world ("wall clock time").
"losely" insofar as the increments do not happen at exactly the same time, but the maximum difference between the wall clock time and the logical time is bound to a somewhat small value (<<1sec).

wall clock time is typically provided by the OS by means of gettimeofday() or similar.

while the two times are synched, they have different offsets.
Pd's logical time simply starts whenever the Pd instance started.
however, gettimeofday() counts seconds since the beginning of the epoch (currently: 1970-01-01 00:00).

to complicate things, NTP-timestamps (as used by OSC) use their own epoch that starts on 1900-01-01 00:00.


using Pd's logical time "as is" as an OSC timestamp, is of course useless (unless you are communicating withing the same Pd-instance), as all participants need to agree on a common epoch.

so what i'm really suggesting to "fix" the timestamps in [packOSC] is to use logical time for *advancing time* (and add some offset to put the timestamps into the same calendar as NTP)

so basically:
- when packOSC gets instantiated, determine the offset of the logical time with respect to the NTP time.
e.g.:
  offset=seconds_from_1900_to_1970+gettimeofday()-sys_getlogicaltime()
- when creating a timestamp, use this to calculate the ideal NTP time:
  now=offset+sys_getlogicaltime()


in the actual implementation there's two issue that should be addressed:
- probably the synching of logical time to wall clock time (that is: the calculation of the offset) should only be perfomed once for all the [packOSC] and [unpackOSC] objects in the running instance, so they are all tightly synched.
- make sure to handle epochs correctly (the next unix epoch starts in 2038; this is still far in the future for many, but for [packOSC] birthday is about as far in the past)

gfmsdtf
IOhannes

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