Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site
In the Forum: Didital Things
In the Thread: High Quality Music Server / CD player
Post Subject: Anything add something to the total load of the processor.Posted by xandcg on: 4/13/2017
Amir,
Anything running in a computer add something to the total load of the computer. The flac decompression is negligible, unless you are using something über low powered - better read quite old. It should not add much more than 1% load to just one of the cores of my computer when playing some 192/24 files I have - what is imperceptible computer-wise.
The maximum real thing the decompression will add is very little latency. However, on the contrary of recording practice where latency is a real thing, it is irrelevant to playback (unless you have serious latency problem, what is indeed a consequence of another serious problem). Does not matter if your play back will start 3ms or 8ms after you hit the play button, what is what it means in this case.
If the script you told about is this one, it does exactly what you should never do (personal opinion) with digital audio files, what is re-sample it. If you, for some reason, want to play all given files in a specific sample rate and bit depth, and you are using Alsa, you are doing it wrong from the very beginning.
There is Jack what is a professional Unix/Linux audio backend, what play only in user selected sample rate and bit depth - and do not modify (read destroy) the source file. And I am not ever talking about the fact Jack is a proper software written in C/C++ (fast), and not a fancy bash/sh script <- Linux folks have fantasies with bash scripts.
If you take a deep look on any Linux distro you will find tons of very complex bash scripts what does things you can do with just a few lines directly calling the commands.
Basically, those scripts try to cover all imaginable scenarios before running something to make it simple to the user. However, 99% of the covered cases are just useful for advanced users what in 99% of cases will change/customize everything anyway. But the real hidden objective is to create bash scripts everywhere, just for the sake of show off their bash skills.
You do not need anything extra to play bit-perfect when using mpd, because it already do it very properly. Mpd is that kind of software: set it up and forget. It rarely breaks, and rarely change anything that needs user intervention.
Cheers!
EDIT: Just for the sake of the transparency, those are two screenshots of my desktop while running top (a small software to monitoring resource usage¹). There are also several other unrelated services running around since it is not something purpose built.
On the top left you can see the *total* CPU usage. The first one is "idle", and the second one is playing a 44/16 flac file. Those number are not static, they change at every minute, but very little if you do not do anything more.
Idle.
Playing.
¹ On the idle file is also possible to see the same but per core at he right side, on Conky behind the terminal emulator.
Before you ask about the righ RAM usage, it is FreeBSD what basically does not flush the memory until the point it need the space for anything - the real usage should be around 700MB. If you have memory you should use it, doesn't you? :-D
Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site