Subject: Re: [ecasound] Overrun ...?
From: Carsten Bauer (cbauer-@t-online.de)
Date: Mon Jun 16 2003 - 21:22:56 EEST
Hi,
> (audioio-alsa) warning! playback overrun - samples lost! Break was at
> least 0.04 ms long.
this is the late great buffer overrun/underrun problem every computer sound
freak has to deal with it, so generally it's not restricted to alsa alone.
Almost all operating systems today are multitasking ones, which cannot devote
their attention to the sound process only. To keep the sound pouring out of
your speakers while the CPU is doing something else for a short while, it is
buffered. Imagine a bucket with a big hole in the bottom. The sound is taken
from the harddisk and poured into the bucket, and the sound card keeps
draining it through the bottom hole towards the output. So you can easily
imagine that everything which disturbs this (slow harddisk, heavily loaded
system etc, etc) can quickly result in a buffer being shortly empty or still
too full to take on the next flush of values.
Check through the available docs on linux-sound and look for the topic
'latency', you'll find a lot of info on this crucial point from people who
can explain it better than I can ..
-Carsten
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