My question is pretty much self explanatory. Sorry if it seems too dumb.
I am writing a iOS VoIP dialer and have checked some open-source code(iOS audio calling app). And almost all of those use Circular Buffer for storing recorded and received PCM audio data. SO i am wondering why we need to use a Circular Buffer in this case. What's the exact reason for using such audio buffer.
Thanks in advance.
Good question. There is another good reason for using Circular Buffer.
In iOS, if you use callbacks(Audio unit) for recording and playing audio(In-fact you need to use it if you want to create a real-time audio transferring app) then you will get a chunk of data for a specific amount of time(let's say 20 milliseconds) from the recorder callback. And in iOS, you will never get fixed length of data always(If you set the callback interval as 20ms then you will get 370 or 372 bytes of data. And you will never know when you will get 370 bytes or 372 bytes. Correct me if i am wrong). Then, to transfer the audio through UDP packets you need to use a codec for data encoding and decoding(G729 is generally used for VoIP apps). But g729 takes data by the multiplier of 8. Assume, you encode 368(8*46) bytes per 20ms. So what are you going to do with rest of the data ? You need to store it by sequence for the next chunk to process.
SO that's the reason. There are some other details thing but i kapt it simple for your better understanding. Just comment below if you have any question.