hi,
is this a known issue : on a powermac g4/800 panther with pd 0.38-
extended, i get a lot of audio dropouts, even when only using one or
two objects, say a readsf~ or just osc~ objects. i tried both
portaudio and jack, doesn't make a difference. the problem seems to
be inside pd. the dropouts occur at the slightest stuff i do, for
example switch to the finder, open a file requester etc. when i run
another app in the background, there's drop outs every few seconds. i
increased the "delay" value in the preferences which i guess is a
kind of I/O vector size, didn't make any change ... sound card is RME
96/8 PAD and i'm not having any difficulties in any other audio app.
thanks for hints! best, -sciss-
Hi Sciss,
fact of the matter is that the Aqua Tcl/Tk GUI on OSX interferes with audio processing in an entirely unacceptable way. When I want to do serious PD audio work, I boot Gentoo PPC Linux. Quite a bit of optimization for video/3d has been done for the OSX version of PD,. This was mostly for GEM, as PDP and PiDiP remain quite unoptimized. But audio doesn't seem to be a specialty/priority for the developers right now. I base this on comments from James Tittle and others when I brought this issue up before. I've also gotten feedback from others on this list that PD+Audio+OSX is on the border between crippled and useless in its current state.
One suggestion which HC Steiner made (IIRC) is to compile PD against a Fink or DarwinPorts X11 version of Tcl/Tk instead of the Aqua one. This entails some makefile buggery which I haven't gotten around to yet.
Another suggestion is to make sure that the realtime priority flag is disabled on OSX with the -nrt flag. This seems to be a workaround in some cases, but not a solution to the problem.
best, d.
no...i'd say there is definately something funny happening there.
i can run heaps of processes on exactly the same system (powermac g4/800 panther) with no trouble.
i still use 0.37 , installed by hand, though.
and do you use tcl aqua or some other tcl as suggested by derek?
i shall go and try to get a custom build as well, i admit as a mac
user i'm a bit lazy with this because you're accustomed to getting
out-of-the-box installers ... everything that goes beyond ./
configure, ./make is psychologically difficult for me ;-)))
best, -sciss-
Am 19.04.2006 um 17:56 schrieb hard off:
no...i'd say there is definately something funny happening there.
i can run heaps of processes on exactly the same system (powermac g4/800 panther) with no trouble.
i still use 0.37 , installed by hand, though.
On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, derek holzer wrote:
the Aqua Tcl/Tk GUI on OSX interferes with audio processing in an entirely unacceptable way.
Hmm, some 1.5 year ago, we found out that Tcl has got a huge problem with redrawing too much of the patch all of the time, on all platforms. I wonder whether this has been handled yet? Is there a new version of Tk that fixes it?... I don't recall.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
On Apr 19, 2006, at 6:42 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, derek holzer wrote:
the Aqua Tcl/Tk GUI on OSX interferes with audio processing in an entirely unacceptable way.
Hmm, some 1.5 year ago, we found out that Tcl has got a huge
problem with redrawing too much of the patch all of the time, on all platforms. I wonder whether this has been handled yet? Is there a new version of Tk that fixes it?... I don't recall.
This has not been addressed at all AFAIK.
.hc
"[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are
deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from
scarcity."
-John Gilmore
I do quite a bit of audio on my Powerbook 800. Its not as good as
linux, but its far from useless. Most of the time, with audio
processing, you actually need to have the realtime mode enabled.
Otherwise the GUI and the audio process have the same priority,
making dropouts much more likely.
There are problems with the realtime flag, but if you are just doing
audio, then it works best with it on on Mac OS X.
The preference is a bit odd. The option is "defeat real-time
scheduling", so for basic audio work, leave it off.
.hc
On Apr 19, 2006, at 5:19 PM, derek holzer wrote:
Hi Sciss,
fact of the matter is that the Aqua Tcl/Tk GUI on OSX interferes
with audio processing in an entirely unacceptable way. When I want
to do serious PD audio work, I boot Gentoo PPC Linux. Quite a bit
of optimization for video/3d has been done for the OSX version of
PD,. This was mostly for GEM, as PDP and PiDiP remain quite
unoptimized. But audio doesn't seem to be a specialty/priority for
the developers right now. I base this on comments from James Tittle
and others when I brought this issue up before. I've also gotten
feedback from others on this list that PD+Audio+OSX is on the
border between crippled and useless in its current state.One suggestion which HC Steiner made (IIRC) is to compile PD
against a Fink or DarwinPorts X11 version of Tcl/Tk instead of the
Aqua one. This entails some makefile buggery which I haven't gotten
around to yet.Another suggestion is to make sure that the realtime priority flag
is disabled on OSX with the -nrt flag. This seems to be a
workaround in some cases, but not a solution to the problem.best, d.
-- derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl ---Oblique Strategy # 82: "Honor thy error as a hidden intention"
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/ listinfo/pd-list
Using ReBirth is like trying to play an 808 with a long stick. -David Zicarelli
On 4/20/06, Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org wrote:
The preference is a bit odd. The option is "defeat real-time scheduling", so for basic audio work, leave it off.
It's not even 'real-time' because no time slicing is negotiated with the kernel. The code just jacks up the pthread priority for Pd. It's a great way to lock yourself out of the GUI when using GEM.
On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, chris clepper wrote:
On 4/20/06, Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org wrote:
The preference is a bit odd. The option is "defeat real-time scheduling", so for basic audio work, leave it off.
It's not even 'real-time' because no time slicing is negotiated with the kernel. The code just jacks up the pthread priority for Pd. It's a great way to lock yourself out of the GUI when using GEM.
It shows even more with GridFlow, because the example patches have their [metro]s too fast for what the cpu can do, especially because of the OSX-specific problem that GridFlow has.
Anyone with a MacIntel can verify whether the slowdown is due to OSX or to PPC ?
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
On Apr 19, 2006, at 11:19 AM, derek holzer wrote:
fact of the matter is that the Aqua Tcl/Tk GUI on OSX interferes
with audio processing in an entirely unacceptable way. When I want
to do serious PD audio work, I boot Gentoo PPC Linux. Quite a bit
of optimization for video/3d has been done for the OSX version of
PD,. This was mostly for GEM, as PDP and PiDiP remain quite
unoptimized.
...here, of course, you meant to distinguish between "ppc/altivec"
and "x86/mmx/sse/sse2" optimizations, which really have nothing to do
with "osx" vs "linux"...
But audio doesn't seem to be a specialty/priority for the
developers right now. I base this on comments from James Tittle and
others when I brought this issue up before.
...guilty as charged! when I don't get paid to work on something, I
tend to focus on what is important to me: feel free to donate a
bounty if you want better ppc/osx/intel/whatever support: I've got
rent to meet, and like to eat too ;-)
I've also gotten feedback from others on this list that PD+Audio +OSX is on the border between crippled and useless in its current
state.
...again, the distinction is "aquaTk on OSX", which is actually
emulating X11 calls thru quartz emulated Quickdraw API to be
displayed by the aqua window manager...by running "x11Tk on OSX" you
get the same bad performance you live with on linux/x11 (ie. back to
the improper way Tk is used in PD, see archives for further
explication and hand-wringing)...
One suggestion which HC Steiner made (IIRC) is to compile PD
against a Fink or DarwinPorts X11 version of Tcl/Tk instead of the
Aqua one. This entails some makefile buggery which I haven't gotten
around to yet.
...newer versions of the tcl/tk frameworks allow one to compile
against aqua or x11 versions of Tk: perhaps you'll wake up one day
and have this for free? As a veteran linux user, a little makefile
buggery should be unconscious for you by now...
Another suggestion is to make sure that the realtime priority flag
is disabled on OSX with the -nrt flag. This seems to be a
workaround in some cases, but not a solution to the problem.
...yeh, this has been covered elsewhere: basically, it's not a good
idea to promote your application's priority above the window
manager's priority, unless you don't want to actually interact with
the gui :-\
james
-
chris clepper -
derek holzer -
Hans-Christoph Steiner -
hard off -
james tittle -
Mathieu Bouchard -
Sciss