PsychPortAudio - aleslab/Psychtoolbox-3-aleslab-fork GitHub Wiki

PsychPortAudio - High precision sound driver for Psychtoolbox-3.

PsychPortAudio is a special sounddriver for PTB-3. It is a replacement
for all other Matlab based sound drivers and PTB's old SND() function.

• Allows instant start of sound playback with a very low onset latency
  compared to other sound drivers (on well working hardware).

• Allows start of playback at a scheduled future system time: E.g.,
  schedule sound onset for a specific time in the future (e.g., visual
  stimulus onset time), then do other things in your Matlab code.
  Scheduled start of playback can be accurate to the sub-millisecond level
  on some system setups.

• Wait for sound onset, or continue with execution of your code
  immediately.

• Asynchronous operation: Sound playback works in the background while
  your code continues to do other things.

• Infinitely repeating playback, or playback of a sound for 'n' times.

• Returns timestamps and status for all crucial events.

• Support multi-channel devices, e.g., 8-channel sound cards.

• Supports multi-channel sound capture and full-duplex capture
  and playback of sound on some systems.

• Enumerate, open and use multiple sound cards in parallel.

• Reliable (compared to Matlabs sound facilities).

• Efficient, causes only very low cpu load.

See the "help InitializePsychSound" for more info on low-latency
configurations. See "help BasicSoundOutputDemo" for a very basic demo of
sound output (without special emphasis on low-latency). See
"BasicSoundInputDemo" for a basic demo of sound capture.
"BasicSoundFeedbackDemo" shows how to implement a simple audio feedback
loop with controllable delay.

"PsychPortAudioTimingTest" is a script that we used for testing PA's
sound onset latency and accuracy. It also serves as an example on how to
get perfectly synched audio-visual stimulus onsets.

Type "PsychPortAudio" for an overview of supported subfunctions and
"PsychPortAudio Subfunctionname?" for help on a specific subfunction.

CAUTION: You *must* call InitializePsychSound before first invocation of
PsychPortAudio(), at least on MS-Windows, but possibly also on OS/X! If
you omit that call, initialization of the driver may fail with some
"Invalid MEX file" error from Matlab!

PsychPortAudio is built around a modified version of the free, open-source
PortAudio sound library for portable realtime sound: http://www.portaudio.com

Handle=0][, repetitions=1][, startSample=0][, endSample=max][, UnitIsSeconds=0][, specialFlags=0]);

PsychPortAudio - High precision sound driver for Psychtoolbox-3.

PsychPortAudio is a special sounddriver for PTB-3. It is a replacement
for all other Matlab based sound drivers and PTB's old SND() function.

PsychPortAudio provides the following features:

• Allows instant start of sound playback with a very low onset latency
  compared to other sound drivers (on well working hardware).

• Allows start of playback at a scheduled future system time: E.g.,
  schedule sound onset for a specific time in the future (e.g., visual
  stimulus onset time), then do other things in your Matlab code.
  Scheduled start of playback can be accurate to the sub-millisecond level
  on some system setups.

• Wait for sound onset, or continue with execution of your code
  immediately.

• Asynchronous operation: Sound playback works in the background while
  your code continues to do other things.

• Infinitely repeating playback, or playback of a sound for 'n' times.

• Returns timestamps and status for all crucial events.

• Support multi-channel devices, e.g., 8-channel sound cards.

• Supports multi-channel sound capture and full-duplex capture
  and playback of sound on some systems.

• Enumerate, open and use multiple sound cards in parallel.

• Reliable (compared to Matlabs sound facilities).

• Efficient, causes only very low cpu load.

See the "help InitializePsychSound" for more info on low-latency
configurations. See "help BasicSoundOutputDemo" for a very basic demo of
sound output (without special emphasis on low-latency). See
"BasicSoundInputDemo" for a basic demo of sound capture.
"BasicSoundFeedbackDemo" shows how to implement a simple audio feedback
loop with controllable delay.

"PsychPortAudioTimingTest" is a script that we used for testing PA's
sound onset latency and accuracy. It also serves as an example on how to
get perfectly synched audio-visual stimulus onsets.

Type "PsychPortAudio" for an overview of supported subfunctions and
"PsychPortAudio Subfunctionname?" for help on a specific subfunction.

CAUTION: You *must* call InitializePsychSound before first invocation of
PsychPortAudio(), at least on MS-Windows, but possibly also on OS/X! If
you omit that call, initialization of the driver may fail with some
"Invalid MEX file" error from Matlab!

PsychPortAudio is built around a modified version of the free, open-source
PortAudio sound library for portable realtime sound: http://www.portaudio.com