MIDI Timing and PC soundcards

[Eli Brandt]

McIntosh, Malcolm wrote:
> What operating system would you suggest one use?  OS/2 Warp, Be
> (http://www.be.com/), LINUX, Macintosh or something else?

You might be interested in
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/papers/eub-rbd-icmc98.pdf
though it's somewhat Microsoft-centric.

Irix: excellent, if price is no object.
Windows: timing-sensitive code needs to be in a device driver.
         W98 is preferred -- it does WDM.  if you like the bleeding edge, 
         try the DirectMusic beta, which claims millisecond MIDI timing.
MacOS: works pretty well, since it doesn't try to do as much for/to you.
       the Mach-based successor to MacOS 8 could screw things up.
DOS: the machine is yours.  have fun talking to the hardware of the week.
BeOS: I hear good things, but haven't worked with it.
OS/2: no clue.

Linux: the OSS sound API is not so hot; I just heard about ALSA and
will definitely be looking more closely at Linux now.  (Particularly
at its realtime behavior...)

BTW, there's been some discussion of OS issues on the music-dsp list:
http://shoko.calarts.edu/~glmrboy/musicdsp/music-dsp.html

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+ at cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/