Help Me Understand Quality Implications & Buffer Size

[vexir]

Hi @briankendall , thanks for merging the fix in 1.0.7. It works now! Question about audio quality based on a Reddit comment I saw when this project was first released. Could you comment, for those of us who are audio laymen, on what effect this tool would have on audio quality and in what circumstances?

To my ears I can't tell a difference but I'm not sure I'm at the conditions where it would matter.

Same question for buffer size - how do we know what the best option is?

[briankendall]

Generally speaking there'll be no discernible effect on audio quality. So long as you don't have either the proxy audio device or whatever it's proxying turned down to a really low volume, it should sound great. The only time you might need to worry about what's happening under the hood is if you were doing professional level audio or music production.

As for the buffer size, the trade-off is that the larger the buffer is, the less likely you are to have issues like pops or clicks in the audio, but the more delay they'll be between when an app starts playing a sound or some music and when you'll actually hear it. In practice I find setting it to either 64 or 128 works great. If you occasionally do hear a little hiccup in the audio you can try making the buffer size bigger, but otherwise if everything sounds good and you're not noticing anything like a delay in the audio then there's no need to change it.

[vexir]

Thanks! Good info.