What OS has the lowest audio latency?

[Super Tech Mike]

I've heard so much about the fantastic audio capabilities of macos, but how about other *nix operating systems? Are they better or worse? And how do they compare to Windows if they are worse?

[Quadrum]

MacOS still has the best audio capabilities. I’ve never heard of any sort other operating system comparing. I run MacOS for music production and truthfully I can’t switch.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Theoretically Linux should be able to compete (seeing as you can literally do what you want at the kernel level and there are audio production distros), but it wouldn't have nearly the same software ecosystem.

[Super Tech Mike]

But has there been instances of linux competing, or is it something nearly impossible to realistically do?

[vorticalbox]

14 hours ago, Quadrum said:

MacOS still has the best audio capabilities. I’ve never heard of any sort other operating system comparing. I run MacOS for music production and truthfully I can’t switch.

Isn't audio quality (including latency) mostly down to the hardware you are running? 

 

I doubt the kernel is adding much delay at all in any operating system. 

[Nayr438]

A realtime kernel and configuring pulseaudio is the only way to really go about audio latency. A Distro wont wont specialize directly in this as it can have various effects on different hardware. I am sure some have minor improvements, but probably nothing worthwhile. Ive seen posts where people have managed to get it down to 5ms while I believe MacOS is around 3ms. By default pulseaudio is around 100+ ms. I think mac gets a advantage here because they control what hardware is in each system. This site seems to go over some of the basics but I don't know how old it is.https://juho.tykkala.fi/Pulseaudio-and-latency. Outside of that there are other settings you can configure in pulseaudio to help align it with your hardware. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio

This is something that really just requires trial and error until you achieve what your after.

[pcs3rd]

@Nayr348 what about jackd?

 

[lakonic]

tried, didnt like what happend with the vst's, maybe next year. had to fiddle around with wine.

[Cobiskuit]

On 2/20/2020 at 7:07 AM, Nayr438 said:

 A Distro wont wont specialize directly in this as it can have various effects on different hardware. I am sure some have minor improvements, but probably nothing worthwhile.

Actually Ubuntu Studio uses low-latency kernels for a long time, to SOME success. I've used it in the past for like, personal home audio recording and it's work really well. It's probably as close to competitive as Linux gets in this space without doing like, an Arch install with that low-latency kernel or something completely custom like mentioned before.

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 hours ago, Cobiskuit said:

Actually Ubuntu Studio uses low-latency kernels for a long time, to SOME success. I've used it in the past for like, personal home audio recording and it's work really well. It's probably as close to competitive as Linux gets in this space without doing like, an Arch install with that low-latency kernel or something completely custom like mentioned before.

This^.  It has been done, but how much success they had over time is not documented.

 

https://opensource.com/life/16/1/configuring-linux-for-music-recording-production

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/using-linux-recording-mastering

[Nayr438]

I don't personally know enough about jack, other than support for it is very inconsistent. Depending on the Applications and Hardware, it could be better, but I wouldn't know.

Ubuntu studio probably has some improvements, but whether they are worthwhile is only something you can decide, but may be worth a look.

The biggest issue is that what works for one set of hardware, can cause a lot of issues on another set, so to keep a Distro as widely available as possible, they have to keep certain limits in mind.

You also don't need Arch, what I mentioned above would work for any Distro using PulseAudio, which is most of them, you just have to configure it for your setup.