Optimizing Audio Code

This post is about squeezing more performance from your microcontroller. If you followed the FIR filter and reverb posts, you will have noticed that we needed to enable compiler optimizations to keep the audio processing time low enough to ensure that all incoming buffers will get processed in a timely fashion – i.e. causing no glitches or other artifacts in the output audio.

While the compiler is particularly smart when it comes to optimization, there are some things that it can miss that you as the programmer can add. Before we get into optimization techniques however, we need to talk about measuring performance.