DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / zita-alsa-pcmi-utils / alsa_delay.1.en
zita-alsa-pcmi(1) General Commands Manual zita-alsa-pcmi(1)

alsa_delay - measure round-trip latency of a soundcard

alsa_delay playdev captdev fsamp frsize nfrags

This tool can be used to measure the round-trip latency of a soundcard. To do this, start the program and connect like this:


alsa_delay -> playdev -> cable from soundcard output to input -> captdev -> alsa_delay

alsa_delay should be able to measure the round-trip latency with an accuracy of around 1/1000 of a sample. The assumption is, that the latency is more or less independent of frequency, and that the cable between soundcard output and input has virtually zero latency.

ALSA playback device (e.g.: hw:0)
ALSA capture device (e.g.: hw:0)
Sample rate (e.g.: 48000)
Period size (e.g.: 256)
Number of fragments (e.g.: 2)

This will measure and display the round-trip latency of soundcard hw:0 using 48kHz samplerate, and 10 fragments each 2048 samples.


alsa_delay hw:0 hw:0 48000 2048 10

alsa_delay is a port of jack_delay (by the same author) to ALSA.

zita-alsa-pcmi was written by Fons Adriaensen <fons@linuxaudio.org>.

This manual page was written by IOhannes m zmoelnig <zmoelnig@iem.at> for the Debian project (but may be used by others).

July 2013