Real time event accuracy

[Paul Rubin]

Tobiah <toby at tobiah.org> writes:
> I'd like to send MIDI events from python to another
> program.  I'd like advice as to how to accurately
> time the events.  I'll have a list of floating point
> start times in seconds for the events, and I'd like to send them
> off as close to the correct time as possible.

I don't think you can really do this accurately enough to get good
sound, but the basic mechanism is time.sleep(t) which takes a floating
point argument.  That turns into the appropriate microsleep, I think.

I'm not even sure how to do it from C code with the Linux realtime
scheduler.  Traditionally for this sort of thing you'd use dedicated
hardware, or else generate waveforms with a little bit of buffering in
the sound card.