Mega Drone

Ever wondered what 100 square waves sound like when played together? Well now you can find out!

Mega Drone is an app which creates 100 oscillators, combines their output in a mixer and plays the resulting sound.

This sample demonstrates how to obtain the lowest latency and optimal computational throughput by:

1. Leaving Oboe to choose the best default stream properties for the current device
2. Setting performance mode to LowLatency
3. Setting sharing mode to Exclusive
4. Setting the buffer size to 2 bursts
5. Using the -Ofast compiler optimization flag, even when building the Debug variant
6. Using getExclusiveCores (API 24+) and thread affinity to bind the audio thread to the best available CPU core(s)
7. Using a StabilizedCallback which aims to spend a fixed percentage of the callback time to avoid CPU frequency scaling (video explanation)

This code was presented at AES Milan and Droidcon Berlin as part of a talk on Oboe.

The following article explaining how to debug CPU performance problems may also be useful when looking at this code.

Implementation details

The stream properties are left to Oboe as such the app must output audio data in a format which matches that of the stream.

Four different formats are supported:

The signal chain for mono streams is:

Oscillators->Mixer

For stereo chains a mono to stereo converter is added to the end of the chain:

Oscillators->Mixer->MonoToStereo

The compiler optimization flag -Ofast can be found in CMakeLists.txt.

Screenshots