While the headphone output jack on your computer is perfectly fine for listening to music, it is not designed for a high speed transfer of audio information.
When using Alphabet Soup, you might notice a slight delay between hitting a key and hearing the sound. This is called latency and it is typically measured in milliseconds (ms). Since this latency is due to hardware design, all computer music software will exhibit some latency.
Most people can notice a latency of more than 12ms. Being specialised musical instruments, most drum machines and synthesizers offer latency performance of roughly 10-12ms.
Most headphone jacks on most computers can only offer a latency of roughly 11 to 50ms.
This is fine for just having fun, but it can become an issue when you want to accurately trigger a variety of different samples in Alphabet Soup.
Fortunately, there are several different companies making USB and Firewire audio interfaces offering less than 10ms latency performance. Some of these interfaces offer as low as 1-3ms latency performance. Alphabet Soup will use other sound devices if they are set to be the default output device.
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