Crackly audio on OSX

[Xaeroxe]

The Amethyst game engine has been receiving reports of crackly distorted audio on OSX. Has this been extensively tested on OSX? One contributor believed this may be due to Mutex use in rodio and cpal, possibly blocking the threads used to send samples through.

[mitchmindtree]

On macOS/iOS, the chain of dependencies are:

rodio <- cpal <- coreaudio-rs <- coreaudio-sys

I would start with the coreaudio-rs example and work my way up the stack until the crackling occurs to hone in on the exact crate where this is occurring. Another thing to keep in mind is that, due to the low latency required, I find I almost always have to compile rust in release for projects involving real-time audio streams or it will almost certainly crackle.

FWIW, we used CPAL (via nannou, not rodio) in a 100+ channel, real-time spatial audio server for an exhibition about a year ago on an old Mac Mini and it ran fine. The museum has continued to use it for multiple exhibitions since and seemingly haven't had any issues, so I would be surprised if it was a performance problem in CPAL or coreaudio-rs.

Anyway, hope this helps!

[incon]

On macOS, I only get crackly audio from the music_flac example all other examples are working fine.

[yerke]

I can confirm that in debug mode only music_flac is crackly, but in release mode it sounds fine.

[paulirotta]

This and #266 on Linux make me think there is a need for buffering the output of Sinks. This of course should be tunable for delay-sensitive use cases.

[paulirotta]

Does the crackly go away when you add .delay(Duration::new(0, 5000) to the last Source before your Sink?

[yerke]

@paulirotta When I modified to sink.append(rodio::Decoder::new(BufReader::new(file)).unwrap().delay(Duration::new(0, 5000))); in examples/music_flac.rs, the crackly sound was still there in debug mode, but not in release mode. So same as before.

[paulirotta]

Ok. Pity. Have you tried https://crates.io/crates/thread-priority to max?

…

On Sat, 6 Jun 2020, 22.48 Yerkebulan Tulibergenov, ***@***.***> wrote: @paulirotta <https://github.com/paulirotta> When I modified to sink.append(rodio::Decoder::new(BufReader::new(file)).unwrap().delay(Duration::new(0, 5000))); in examples/music_flac.rs, the crackly sound was still there in debug mode, but not in release mode. So the same as before. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#225 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA2TGA7IZXU5YVJH7JABLHDRVKMPBANCNFSM4HMGNWLQ> .

[Akirami]

Same issu here, not with a Sink but with DynamicMixer::mixer.

The weird thing is the sound crakle only the first time i play it in a loop, the second time and all others loop are fine.

Same thing, no crackly sound once released.

@paulirotta This crate is not for MacOS.
I'll test with https://crates.io/crates/audio_thread_priority

[paulirotta]

Audio is crackly on all platforms with debug builds. audio_thread_priority looks like a good find (the other library author has not had time to add macOS support). Please let us know if that works and perhaps it would be a good addition to rodio