Reduce audio latency

[T2hhbmEK]

I'm experiencing somewhat at least 300ms audio lagging using WayDroid. It would be better if WayDroid improves it.

There was a hack to Anbox to fix similar issue.

anbox/anbox#1034

It fixed the issue by synchronizing the Android audio thread with the client. It requires changing some APIs and a rebuilding of the Android image. It may cause audio to stop working if the client application isn't running.

There maybe some better implementations. That remains to be discussed.

[Quackdoc]

alright, so I measures a round trip latency of 480~ms using jackdelay loop, this is certainly something that can be improved on for sure

[cobalt2727]

I'm also experiencing this, initially I just figured it was my Bluetooth headphones acting up but I got the same latency issues with my onboard speakers.

[enderprism]

I'm also experiencing this. The lag is especially annoying since I'm playing GDPS Editor 2.2 (Geometry Dash), which requires audio to sync (almost) perfectly.

[JamiKettunen]

Waydroid connects to the host Pulseaudio socket, someone with knowledge may look into https://github.com/waydroid/android_hardware_waydroid/tree/lineage-18.1/audio to figure out what's causing all the delay, perhaps playing with some environment variables from host (or even system.img/init.environ.rc) side like PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 would help too?

Some further reading for someone interested: https://juho.tykkala.fi/Pulseaudio-and-latency

[Quackdoc]

Waydroid connects to the host Pulseaudio socket, someone with knowledge may look into https://github.com/waydroid/android_hardware_waydroid/tree/lineage-18.1/audio to figure out what's causing all the delay, perhaps playing with some environment variables from host (or even system.img/init.environ.rc) side like PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 would help too?

Some further reading for someone interested: https://juho.tykkala.fi/Pulseaudio-and-latency

IIRC I did try this to no success, but as I have no facilities to make test builds atm, I haven't really looked into it

[Quackdoc]

Seems like there are more victims of this I've had multiple people report that the audio latency makes games like sonolus (works with libhoudini) very much unenjoyable

Linux: Arch
Audiostack: Pipewire
CPU: ryzen 2600
GPUL rx 580 + arc A350

[Quackdoc]

@JamiKettunen do you have any other potential variables? I was able to get the latency down to 350ms using that specific one, which brings it down to usable range for a decent number of folk (probably)

[T2hhbmEK]

Have been using redroid and scrcpy for a while. scrcpy started to support audio forwarding recently. Not yet checked WayDroid recently. IMO Audio latency is much lower. I prefer full screen emulation and redroid seems superior for my use case.

[Thesola10]

Overlaying a file /system/etc/init/audio.rc containing the following:

on init
    export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC 60
    export PIPEWIRE_LATENCY 96/48000

I'm getting a lower QUANT on pw-top, to little success

[Quackdoc]

you can use a "Microphone to speaker" device and pipewire + jackdelay to get a physical number to check.

[Thesola10]

from what I can tell there's a slight improvement, but it's still very much unplayable. Not sure if libhoudini is inducing latency as well.
I believe the offset I set is 200ms? I can't get mic-to-speaker apps on Waydroid to work at all so jack_delay won't work on my machine :(

[ilhan-athn7]

Scrcpy seems to be able to forward audio with a little lower latency, but it still not feels like real-time audio.
I use these command to get sound from scrcpy;
scrcpy --no-video --audio-codec=aac --audio-encoder='OMX.google.aac.encoder'

Additionally --audio-buffer=value and --audio-bit-rate=value arguments are available.

[Quackdoc]

Scrcpy seems to be able to forward audio with a little lower latency, but it still not feels like real-time audio. I use these command to get sound from scrcpy; scrcpy --no-video --audio-codec=aac --audio-encoder='OMX.google.aac.encoder'

Additionally --audio-buffer=value and --audio-bit-rate=value arguments are available.

any chance you could check the delay? I use a microphone to speaker app and jack_delay to test typically, I don't have time atm