[Todd Madson]

Re: Audion 2.61 - that's more like it. Where can I get this player?
I'll buy it straight away if it really works that way.

[Spheric Harlot]

...and, for the record, the iPod isn't shipping for another ten days, either.

[fitter]

Audion is available at www.panic.com/audion . There are hundreds of nice skins for it.

My first experience with Audion 2.6.1 wasn't good, I'm afraid. Initially it was using around 30-40% of the processor during playback, 5-10% when idle. I lowered the playback buffer size by about half, and CPU usage was consequently halved, actually more than halved: I'm now using about 10-15% of the CPU. I'm surprised this setting could make such a difference, given that the buffer size isn't very big to begin with; but then I don't really know very much about the ins and outs of decoding mp3s for playback. At any rate, Audion 2.6.1 is suddenly very reasonable as far as CPU usage goes.

[Millennium]

There are two major ways to reduce CPU usage in Audion. While I don't know if these will have as dramatic an impace in 2.6.1, they should have some at least.

1) Turn off scrolling text.
2) Turn off the equalizer.

That second one is a problem for a lot of people, I know, but it does drop the CPU usage significantly. However, even the first gives a nice boost.

By the way, I'd be willing to guess that adding an equalizer is going to cause iTunes2's CPU usage to increase. This may or may not be offset by other improvements; I just don't know.

[Immortal K-Mart Employee]

Originally posted by mr.strange:
<STRONG>Can one of the *cough* beta testers of iTunes 2 comment on if the cpu/mem usage has changed from version 1?</STRONG>

It seems the same as 1.0. On my 450Mhz G4 it takes between 15 - 35%.

[Gee4orce]

Theory: maybe it's not the MP3 decoding that's causing the high CPU usage, but the core audio routines that actually produce sound. Most PCs offload audio to a sound card, but AFAIK Mac's handle this in the CPU.

[iCartman]

By that theory playing a CD on a Mac would use at least 10% of the CPU

[Guy Incognito]

Holy fsck! As advertised...Audion 2.6.1 on my Dual-800 G4 stays between 5%-11% while the active app and between 2%-5% while the background. And drops to 0%-1% while idle. Clicking doesn't grind the app's graphics refresh to a halt: another welcomed addition.

THIS is how carbon apps should be coded.

Panic gets my money.

I wanna see Microshaft compare Winblows Media Prayer to Audion 2.6.1.

[Bouba]

Originally posted by iCartman:
<STRONG>By that theory playing a CD on a Mac would use at least 10% of the CPU</STRONG>

in fact, since os 9 the cds are played numerically. Thus, the measured statistics are about 0.5% CPU usage on a PowerBook G3 300MHz when the sound output setting is set to 44.1 kHz. You end up with a far better sound (apparently).

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1187.html

you can read this page for more info about it

[rw]

Originally posted by j3kyll:
<STRONG>AroFM

Pros:

Uses as much CPU as mpg123 command line player.
Has a nice simple UI.



Cons:

Its in japanese (could someone please translate the menu items?).


J3kyll</STRONG>

I've put a translation of the menus for you on my iDisk: http://homepage.mac.com/gmugmble/FileSharing1.html

For the record, Aro-FM used 15-20% CPU, iTunes 2 used 20-25%, and Audion 2.6.1 used a whopping 45-50%, playing the same MP3 file. The test system was an iMac 500 MHz, 640 MB.

With iTunes, I found that turning off the equalizer and the "Sound Enhancer" made no appreciable difference.

---

Addendum: I see there are some tips for reducing Audion's CPU usage that I have yet to try.

[ 11-04-2001: Message edited by: rw ]

[ 11-04-2001: Message edited by: rw ]

[uochris]

Originally posted by iCartman:
<STRONG>By that theory playing a CD on a Mac would use at least 10% of the CPU</STRONG>

According to top, playing an audio CD in iTunes uses 10-20% of the CPU on my 400mh firewire powerbook.

[Calli46]

With iTunes, I found that turning off the equalizer and the "Sound Enhancer" made no appreciable difference.

Same experience here. Testing iTunes 2 with Top showed a CPU Usage between 7% ad 18%, most often around 12% on my G4-500 DP, while in the foreground playing a tune. Turning off the equalizer didn't change anything.

[c4zp3rgh0zt]

Originally posted by Immortal K-Mart Employee:
<STRONG>

I think we are talking about 10 to 20%.

No MP3 player uses 0% CPU.</STRONG>

Actually winamp w/ a decent CPU on win2k or winXP can make you think it's using 0%. The process viewer only shows whole # percentages so if the mp3 players CPU usage spends most of the time below 1% it will report 0%.

You need to use a tool with a finer granularity to see the actual CPU usage. On an old T-bird 1.333 you get between .5 and 1.5%... on a more recent Athlon XP 1800+ it only goes over 1% when using visualizations.

[Spliffdaddy]

Originally posted by c4zp3rgh0zt:
<STRONG>

Actually winamp w/ a decent CPU on win2k or winXP can make you think it's using 0%. The process viewer only shows whole # percentages so if the mp3 players CPU usage spends most of the time below 1% it will report 0%.

You need to use a tool with a finer granularity to see the actual CPU usage. On an old T-bird 1.333 you get between .5 and 1.5%... on a more recent Athlon XP 1800+ it only goes over 1% when using visualizations.</STRONG>

WinAmp uses less than 1% of the CPU on my P3 machine&gt;

low quality mpeg (348k) first entry at the top...

task manager

[ 11-04-2001: Message edited by: Spliffdaddy ]

[OverclockedHomoSapien]

itunes uses 10-20% CPU on my Powermac G4 400 agp w/576MB RAM. That's while playing a CD.

So this isn't about MP3 decoding, it's about iTunes audio playback.

I wonder, if OS X didn't have any way to measure processor load, would threads like this exist? I don't remember anyone complaining about CPU usage in OS 9, yet the problem must have existed with 9 as well. Anyways iTunes 2 rocks, I love the EQ, and the CPU usage doesn't bother me yet.

I suspect that the reason for high CPU usage in iTunes is that macs use the CPU for audio processing, while PCs use soundcards for processing. Unfortunately, Apple seems to have no interest in using audio cards on Macs. Creative approached Apple about making the Soundblaster a BTO card, but Apple refused. Too bad, because if OS X had native support for a SBL, audio would really rock on OS X, and it wouldn't use up much CPU time.

[Scrod]

Originally posted by OverclockedHomoSapien:
<STRONG>itunes uses 10-20% CPU on my Powermac G4 400 agp w/576MB RAM. That's while playing a CD.

So this isn't about MP3 decoding, it's about iTunes audio playback.

I wonder, if OS X didn't have any way to measure processor load, would threads like this exist? I don't remember anyone complaining about CPU usage in OS 9, yet the problem must have existed with 9 as well. </STRONG>

I don't recall feeling any slow-down in OS 9 while playing an MP3 or any audio of any sort, neither on my 200 MHz PowerMac 6500 nor on my blue & white G3, nor on my Pismo PowerBook G3.

[Colonel Panic]

use "macload" on 9 and you'll see iTunes do the same sort of CPU hogging. you don't "feel" it, though, since the GUI isn't CPU intensive....

[foamy]

on my g3-350, iTunes 2.0.1 uses 25-30%, while Audioin uses 20-25%, however iTunes sounds a TON better. I played the same mp3 at the same volume, then compared the two by pausing one and playing the other, then vice versa. iTunes 2.0 was much nicer sounding. The EQ of both were flat.

[Gee4orce]

I noticed last night that my iMac DV SE can play a DVD with as little as 40% CPU usage (althogh average is 60-80%). iTunes take average 30%.

It seems to me that the iTunes guys need to spend a few weeks learning about optimisation from the DVD guys at Apple...

[Zadian]

On my iMac DV (400MHz) i get this in top:
655 top 10.7%
461 OmniWeb 43.1%
404 iTunes 26.7%

Top being the frontmost app, iTunes playing a 160 k/bs Song in the dock and OmniWeb having 3 windows open.

26% CPU usage for a mp3 Player is much but comparded to the 10% for top it's not that much.

[Mediaman_12]

Originally posted by mudzilla:
<STRONG>mint!</STRONG>

I tried Mint, and my entire system almost came to a compleate halt. The mouse pointer jumped around the screen etc.

[moki]

From the mpg123 home page:

.....

The benchmarking lie?
Let's write a few notes about benchmarking the different mp3 decoders, which are available. 'top' is NOT a benchmark, it's a simple check on how a program performs. The sad thing with 'top' (or better the linux kernel) is, that it has some problems with the measurement of threaded programs or programs only requesting short chunks of processor time. One real test is to measure how long your machine needs to decode a stream without threads with 100% CPU. Using mpg123 you can do this with
time mpg123 -t mp3stream.mp3
or
time mpg123 -s mp3stream.mp3 &gt; /dev/null

[kangoo_boo]

i have no mp3 players that doesn't skip when i switch resolution... but on OSX.
Using mpg123, xmms, winamp, etc on XP pro and Linux2.4.1X/Xfree86 4.2.
Since I do a lot of switching on linux (console/xwindow server) it is annoying. On xp it is less annoying but still. Only osx doesn't skip (and it switch resolutions so fast wah)

[Eug]

Originally posted by j3kyll:
<STRONG>AroFM

Pros:

Uses as much CPU as mpg123 command line player.
Has a nice simple UI.



Cons:

Its in japanese (could someone please translate the menu items?).

J3kyll</STRONG>

My Japanese is Rusty but:

First of all that's not the Aro-FM menu bar. Somehow you've gotten the Finder Menu bar in Japanese. The Aro-FM menu bar is as follows:

Aro-FM column: About Aro-FM etc.
Edit column: the usual stuff
Unknown column: grayed out
Skins: (two choices)
Control: Self-Timer; ID3 Text; Aro-FM Folder