Miles Sound System SDK 7.2a

Sharing the CPU under MacOS

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Under MacOS X, Miles does most of its work in a background thread. Again, this means that Miles usually does its work without you even having to worry about it and that the mixing and buffer submission to the sound hardware all happens without your intervention.

The only time on MacOS X, that you may need to specifically give Miles CPU time is if the system thread scheduler starts performing badly and the background Miles thread starves. Under the MacOS X, the thread scheduler usually has the most trouble when performing disk I/O.

Miles provides several techniques to handle thread-starvation. See the AIL_get_timer_highest_delay function as well as the "My sound is skipping on Windows or MacOS X - what can I do?" FAQ for more details.

Under MacOS 9 and below, Miles does most of its work in background interrupt functions. This means that Miles usually does its work without you even having to worry about it. The mixing and buffer submission to Sound Manager all happens without your intervention.

The only time on MacOS 9 and below that you may need to specifically give Miles CPU time is if you are using the QuickTime MIDI synthesizer which requires you to service it with the AIL_serve function. The Miles synthesizer usually sounds better and takes less CPU time, though, so this usually is unnecessary.

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Group: Overview for MacOS: Miles on Macintosh
Related Functions: AIL_get_timer_highest_delay, AIL_serve
Related FAQs: My sound is skipping on Windows or MacOS X - what can I do?