Latency in Computer Audio
Latency can be a particular problem in audio platforms. A popular solution is Steinberg's ASIO, which bypasses these layers and connects audio signals directly to the sound card's hardware. Most professional and semi-professional audio applications utilize the ASIO driver, allowing users to work with audio in real time.
The RT-kernel (RealTime-kernel) is a modified Linux-kernel, that alters the standard timer frequency the Linux kernel uses and gives all processes or threads the ability to have realtime-priority. (This means, that a time-critical process like an audio-stream can get priority over another, less-critical process like network activity. This is also configurable per user (for example, the processes of user "tux" could have priority over processes of user "nobody" or over the processes of several system daemons). On a standard Linux-system, this is possible with only one process at the same time.
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