Comments on: A little progress: Audio on low speed CPUs

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:21:57 +0000

I’ve tried using nice in the past, but it didn’t seem to make too much difference. My meager understanding of nice, coupled with my meager understanding of the problem, suggests that playing tunes is overwhelming even the nice-ing option. But I am not opposed to trying again. …

By: ojm

ojm — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:32:38 +0000

How about running it with nice?

By: Luca

Luca — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:55:34 +0000

Ogg Vorbis got quite a bit of slack when it first became popular due to the higher CPU usage compared to MP3s. The default libvorbis decoder uses floating point math quite intensively, which on older machines can be slow. There is an alternative called libvorbisidec which uses integer only math, it appears to be quite popular with embedded systems:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/BuildMpd

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 10:16:53 +0000

Not … really. I’ve tried different frontends that employ different decoders, but results have usually been the same. I am thinking about recasting some of the music I listen to most as lower quality, or switching codecs. At this point, it’s either that or swap ALSA for OSS. Anything could work. …

By: Anon

Anon — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 09:16:00 +0000

Have you tried the more optimized decoders?

mpg123 for mp3s, mplayer for anything else?

By: Aberinkulas

Aberinkulas — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 02:53:04 +0000

How much music does K Mandla have? It depends on that, mostly.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:26:35 +0000

Have you tried the FLAC music format?

I have all my CD rips in FLAC and high quality MP3. My server (Pentium 133MHz running Debian stable with a Soundblaster AWE64 ISA card) is able to play back my FLAC files using about 30-40% CPU usage. Playing an MP3 generally has the CPU at 100% usage. I use MOC as my music player.

I realise FLAC files are a lot larger but if its stutter free playback old older hardware you want then you may have to change format. Of course being lossless FLAC files are also higher quality than MP3s

I have a large hard drive (1TB) in my Pentium machine so disk space isn’t a problem (for now) but perhaps this isn’t an option for you.

Something to consider though.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:36:21 +0000

I’ve tried those flags in the past with different applications, and you’re right, I should try them again.

Sometimes ffast-math left me with broken applications or libraries though. I usually use -Os on machines with little memory.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:34:13 +0000

I think that might be my next step, actually.

By: anon

anon — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:10:00 +0000

Just an app suggestion, but you should try out rhapsody. It’s one of the few console irc clients I can stomach, because mainly of it’s gui-ish UI.

site’s at http://rhapsody.sourceforge.net/index.html – compile from source.