I am about to start working on a project which involves real-time audio processing for an audio effects application. The application is supposed to acquire and process audio from 8 individual audio input channels at a sample rate of 48kHz. The audio processing algorithm generates audio for 8 individual audio output channels. The audio sample format is 16-bit signed LPCM. Since it's for a real-time audio effects application, latency is also important. If audio is looped from input to output without any processing, the round-trip latency should not exceed 12ms.
The application should receive 256*8 input samples every 5.33ms (via an audio callback), process those samples and transmit 256*8 output samples (also via callback). The 256*8 samples are received/sent in some kind of "interleaved" format.
I am currently researching different hardware platforms and I was wondering if the Raspberry PI 2 B could be a suitable choice. The board itself seems to have a lot of horse power (900MHz Quad Core ARM CPU), but it only has audio input. So my questions are:
- Is the Raspberry PI 2 B suitable for real-time audio processing?
- If the answer to 1 is yes, then I would like to know if there are any add-on audio boards for the Raspberry PI 2 B on the market with 8 input channels and 8 output channels? The board must support 48kHz sample rate.
- If the answer to 1 or [2] is no, which HW platform would you recommend?
The reason why I'm looking at the Raspberry PI 2 B is the attractive price, but there might be other types of boards on the market which are more suitable for this kind of application.
