IMPLEMENTING REAL-TIME PARTITIONED CONVOLUTION ALGORITHMS ON CONVENTIONAL OPERATING SYSTEMS

We describe techniques for implementing real-time partitioned convolution algorithms on conventional operating systems using two different scheduling paradigms: time-distributed (cooperative) and multi-threaded (preemptive). We discuss the optimizations applied to both implementations and present measurements of their performance for a range of impulse response lengths on a recent high-end desktop machine. We find that while the time-distributed implementation is better suited for use as a plugin within a host audio application, the preemptive version was easier to implement and significantly outperforms the time-distributed version despite the overhead of frequent context switches.