Re: MP3 problems.

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, R.A.Fletcher wrote:

> Here's a good one for you. Under Windows I have Winamp going 
> and it can be on the highest quality setting and play MP3's easily. 
> The system slows, but the sound is great! Under Linux Freeamp, 
> and many others play the MP3, even at reduced sound quality, 

First off, check all the options, command line and all, there may be
some magic ones (increase cache size is always a goodie) that just makes
it work :)

Secondly, unlike other OS's, an app can't just grab all the CPU time it
wants. It has CPU time allocated - and if that amount of time isn't
enough, well, tough bud. What you want to do is 're-nice' the application
- basically, run it at a higher priority so that it gets a bigger share of
the pie. If Win slows right down to play MP3's, that's showing you that
you don't have a powerful enough CPU - Linux will generally never slow
down or stop other services to that degree unless you ask it to; it's just
a silly idea. Anyway, look at the man page for nice(1), and fiddle with
that. If playing improves every time you jack the program up a level,
you've pretty much found your problem.

Cheers,

Alex.


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