REAL-TIME, LOW LATENCY AUDIO PROCESSING IN JAVA
Nicolas Juillerat, Stéfan Müller Arisona, Simon Schubiger-Banz · University of Michigan Library Repository · 2007
This paper discusses the implementation of real-time and low latency audio processing in Java. Despite the fact that Java SE is widespread and has a large programmer base, it is clearly neither targeted at real-time, nor at lowlatency applications. As such, doing good audio processing with this language is a challenging task and various issues have to be taken into account: these include limitations or properties of the audio drivers, the kernel and operating system, the audio API, the Java virtual machine and the garbage collector. We present a concrete Java audio processing framework called Decklight 4 that takes up the challenge. We show that, despite of many constraints, it is possible to get latencies as low as a few milliseconds on a standard personal computer using Java. We present the various elements of our implementation that allow such a result to be achieved, and we validate them through experimental measurements.