Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Switching to mpd

I was until recently using xmms2 as a music daemon. I was finding it neat, providing a good command-line (thus scriptable) control over how the music was playing, and I was using xmms2 info to automatically write signature files for my mails. However, I got annoyed by one quite painful thing: on my computer, it can take up to 40% of the processor to play a MP3 file (AMD64 x2 4200+ @2.2GHz)! That is mad. One of the consequences was that the music was jaggy whenever aptitude was upgrading packages... Annoying.

So, I've switched to mpd. It provides a decent command-line client, with possibly a bit less features than xmms2, but it takes only a few percent of the processor's usage... Thanks !

2 comments:

J.M. Hardin said...

I love mpd. I checked it out last year when Caspar Clemens Mierau blogged it on Planet Ubuntu back in June. Before that I was a diehard Amarok user but now I never fire up Amarok anymore, I just open up Sonata or Relaxx and let the tunage roll.

Unknown said...

Sounds like you had a fucked up setup... did you read:

http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/wiki/Why_does_XMMS2_use_so_much_CPU


Did it help, otherwise update that page with your findings.