How to program a real-time accurate audio sequencer on the iphone?

Question

I want to program a simple audio sequencer on the iphone but I can't get accurate timing. The last days I tried all possible audio techniques on the iphone, starting from AudioServicesPlaySystemSound and AVAudioPlayer and OpenAL to AudioQueues.

In my last attempt I tried the CocosDenshion sound engine which uses openAL and allows to load sounds into multiple buffers and then play them whenever needed. Here is the basic code:

init:

int channelGroups[1];
channelGroups[0] = 8;
soundEngine = [[CDSoundEngine alloc] init:channelGroups channelGroupTotal:1];

int i=0;
for(NSString *soundName in [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"base1", @"snare1", @"hihat1", @"dit", @"snare", nil])
{
    [soundEngine loadBuffer:i fileName:soundName fileType:@"wav"];
    i++;
}

[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:0.14 target:self selector:@selector(drumLoop:) userInfo:nil repeats:YES];

In the initialisation I create the sound engine, load some sounds to different buffers and then establish the sequencer loop with NSTimer.

audio loop:

- (void)drumLoop:(NSTimer *)timer
{
for(int track=0; track<4; track++)
{
    unsigned char note=pattern[track][step];
    if(note)
        [soundEngine playSound:note-1 channelGroupId:0 pitch:1.0f pan:.5 gain:1.0 loop:NO];
}

if(++step>=16)
    step=0;

}

Thats it and it works as it should BUT the timing is shaky and instable. As soon as something else happens (i.g. drawing in a view) it goes out of sync.

As I understand the sound engine and openAL the buffers are loaded (in the init code) and then are ready to start immediately with alSourcePlay(source); - so the problem may be with NSTimer?

Now there are dozens of sound sequencer apps in the appstore and they have accurate timing. I.g. "idrum" has a perfect stable beat even in 180 bpm when zooming and drawing is done. So there must be a solution.

Does anybody has any idea?

Thanks for any help in advance!

Best regards,

Walchy

---

Thanks for your answer. It brought me a step further but unfortunately not to the aim. Here is what I did:

nextBeat=[[NSDate alloc] initWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0.1];
[NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:@selector(drumLoop:) toTarget:self withObject:nil];

In the initialisation I store the time for the next beat and create a new thread.

- (void)drumLoop:(id)info
{
    [NSThread setThreadPriority:1.0];

    while(1)
    {
        for(int track=0; track<4; track++)
        {
            unsigned char note=pattern[track][step];
            if(note)
                [soundEngine playSound:note-1 channelGroupId:0 pitch:1.0f pan:.5 gain:1.0 loop:NO];
        }

        if(++step>=16)
            step=0;     

        NSDate *newNextBeat=[[NSDate alloc] initWithTimeInterval:0.1 sinceDate:nextBeat];
        [nextBeat release];
        nextBeat=newNextBeat;
        [NSThread sleepUntilDate:nextBeat];
    }
}

In the sequence loop I set the thread priority as high as possible and go into an infinite loop. After playing the sounds I calculate the next absolute time for the next beat and send the thread to sleep until this time.

Again this works and it works more stable than my tries without NSThread but it is still shaky if something else happens, especially GUI stuff.

Is there a way to get real-time responses with NSThread on the iphone?

Best regards,

Walchy

Answer 1

NSTimer has absolutely no guarantees on when it fires. It schedules itself for a fire time on the runloop, and when the runloop gets around to timers, it sees if any of the timers are past-due. If so, it runs their selectors. Excellent for a wide variety of tasks; useless for this one.

Step one here is that you need to move audio processing to its own thread and get off the UI thread. For timing, you can build your own timing engine using normal C approaches, but I'd start by looking at CAAnimation and especially CAMediaTiming.

Keep in mind that there are many things in Cocoa that are designed only to run on the main thread. Don't, for instance, do any UI work on a background thread. In general, read the docs carefully to see what they say about thread-safety. But generally, if there isn't a lot of communication between the threads (which there shouldn't be in most cases IMO), threads are pretty easy in Cocoa. Look at NSThread.