When you have 100k people paying $500 to the sky is the limit, failure is not an option. Increasingly audio engineers and subsequently performers are at the mercy of the latest jr developers who don’t have to live with the failures of their short sightedness. Grimes’ Coachella set case in point. Wholly due to pioneer ignoring their users for over a decade. Sometimes we don’t have 3 days to copy files to a usb drive but I digress.
What do you think happens a dense crowd of 500+ people suddenly starts to have excruciating ear pain?
For example, here is one rig:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/7y2u3o/ableton_mai...
It uses a Radial SW8 to automatically switch between the redundant machines if one flakes out:
Grimes is a "dj" that does not understand the software. Fixin that problem is one fucking click on the interface.
We're always dealing with risk and trade-offs. Maybe you avoid a locking `atomic` synchronization point by implementing a more complicated lock-free ringbuffer, but in the process you introduce some other bug that has you dumping uninitialized memory into the DAC.
I think the advice in TFA is totally reasonable and worth following. I'm just saying that there may be cases where it's OK to violate some of these rules. I'd love to see more data to help inform those decisions.
This isn't even in opposition to the article, which says explicitly:
>Some low-level audio libraries such as JACK or CoreAudio use these techniques internally, but you need to be sure you know what you’re doing, that you understand your thread priorities and the exact scheduler behavior on each target operating system (and OS kernel version). Don’t extrapolate or make assumptions
