![]() As a rule, we begin to perceive a sound as separate (or in a sense, to hear an echo) for latencies of over 20 ms, and we start to "feel" some sort of lag or artifact at around 12 ms. Even for professional musicians, the boundary below which latency becomes completely irrelevant is not much lower. On top of that, there's a limit beyond which humans can no longer detect latency, and that threshold is actually much higher. This means that for someone like a pianist, playing a digital piano directly into their headphones at zero audio latency would effectively feel like listening to themselves play the piano in the future. This isn't due to some flaw in the instrument's design it's just a simple consequence of the laws of physics for a mechanical wave.įor a violin - which is held just a few inches away from the player's ear - this delay translates to around 0.5 ms, and for larger instruments which are played farther away (like a piano, guitar, or drum set), this can easily reach 3 ms or more. This means that even for plain old physical instruments, there exists an audio delay between the moment the instrument is played and the instant the sound reaches the musician's ear. In regular conditions, a sound wave propagates at around 340 meters (or 1100 feet) through the air in a single second. ![]() The fact of the matter is that sound (along with everything else we know of in the Universe) travels at a finite speed. At least for just about every application you can come up with, the goal is not to reach 0 ms latency: that simply does not exist. The short answer - unlike almost every other spec companies like to fight over - is no. But what happens after that? Is it still worth investing in continuing to reduce latency down to, say, 5 ms, 1 ms, or even less? The audio latency in Android has already fallen to well within acceptable levels, and if recent history is anything to go by, we'll likely be hitting the target value of 10 ms for professional audio applications by the time Android N (Nutella? Nougat?) rolls out. A Nexus 4 running Android 4.2.2 had an estimated audio latency of about 195 ms, and the upgrade to version 5.1 brought that down to just 58 ms. Things have improved progressively over the years, and the jump to Lollipop alone was responsible for slashing latency by up to two thirds. To their credit, Google haven't been slacking off either. Because of this, Apple was able to take what it already had available on its desktop operating system and port it over to the first version of iPhone OS, as it was called back then. Core Audio has actually been around for much longer than the iPhone has: it was initially developed for OS X Panther, way back in 2003. Basically, Core Audio is comprised of a set of frameworks that allow for a lot of overhead involved in audio processing to be shortened or dropped out entirely. Because of this, Superpowered estimate that many millions of dollars that could have been generated by Android's 1 billion users are instead being left for Apple and iOS developers to grab.īut why exactly does iOS have such an unfair advantage over Android? The reason has to do with something Apple calls its "Core Audio" infrastructure. On Google Play, the Music category is neither in the top five categories by downloads nor by revenue. Superpowered, a company that makes an audio SDK that works across multiple platforms, compiled data from both Google Play and the App Store and concluded that, even though music apps only accounted for 3% of app downloads on iOS in Q1 of 2015, the Music app category was the third highest revenue generating category in the App Store. While the success of the iPad was arguably a large contributing factor (since composing music on a tablet is an incomparably better experience than on a small phone screen), it simply would not have been possible for iOS to reach the popularity it has today within the music industry if it hadn't solved the issue of audio latency first. ![]() On the other hand, iOS had all the requirements for a thriving music creation ecosystem. ![]()
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