I have an Acer Aspire One 751h which has a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
It seems unable to decode radio streams that run at 128k, all BBC radio streams stutter hopelessly whether I use a dedicated application (radiotray) or try listening using iPlayer in Firefox.
Running top shows radiotray using around 60% of the CPU with pulseaudio using 10% or so, that doesn't leave much to spare!
Do I really need a faster computer to listen to radio on line? I'm pretty sure it's not a bandwidth problem, the on-line BBC iPlayer bandwidth check tells me I have enough bandwidth to play HD television.
Are there any audio/radio apps out there which specifically aim at using as little CPU as possible?
On 23 April 2012 21:57, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
I have an Acer Aspire One 751h which has a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
It seems unable to decode radio streams that run at 128k, all BBC radio streams stutter hopelessly whether I use a dedicated application (radiotray) or try listening using iPlayer in Firefox.
Ahh.... old problem re-hashed yet again.
Does this stream run ok?
http://streamer-dtc-aa01.somafm.com:80/stream/1021
Please email us a *direct* link to the stream in question.
Running top shows radiotray using around 60% of the CPU with pulseaudio using 10% or so, that doesn't leave much to spare!
Sounds like a buggy program.
Regards, Srdjan
On 23 April 2012 21:57, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote: I have an Acer Aspire One 751h which has a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
It seems unable to decode radio streams that run at 128k, all BBC radio streams stutter hopelessly whether I use a dedicated application (radiotray) or try listening using iPlayer in Firefox.
Encode yourself an mp3 from a CD (that you own) at average bitrate of 128k. Play back on the same machine.
Regards, Srdjan
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 10:12:49PM +0100, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
On 23 April 2012 21:57, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote: I have an Acer Aspire One 751h which has a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
It seems unable to decode radio streams that run at 128k, all BBC radio streams stutter hopelessly whether I use a dedicated application (radiotray) or try listening using iPlayer in Firefox.
Encode yourself an mp3 from a CD (that you own) at average bitrate of 128k. Play back on the same machine.
Exactly the same effect - intermittent playback. I'm using exaile to play it.
I've just tried parole, identical. Running top shows parole using around 21% of CPU with pulseaudio at 15%, parole occasionally goes higher on CPU usage.
Finally tried totem and that actually does a bit better, manages to play the MP3 almost acceptably, but top shows it using around 80% of CPU. Actually it's not all that good, several breaks in playback just now.
On 23 April 2012 22:38, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 10:12:49PM +0100, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
On 23 April 2012 21:57, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote: I have an Acer Aspire One 751h which has a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/52837-20-sound-problem-acer-aspire-751h
Exactly the same effect - intermittent playback. I'm using exaile to play it.
I've just tried parole, identical. Running top shows parole using around 21% of CPU with pulseaudio at 15%, parole occasionally goes higher on CPU usage.
Finally tried totem and that actually does a bit better, manages to play the MP3 almost acceptably, but top shows it using around 80% of CPU. Actually it's not all that good, several breaks in playback just now.
Hmm. Are all those using gstreamer as the back-end?
I had audio issues over the weekend when trying to find out why older games have sound lag or mute. Seems if I disable PulseAudio temporarily, it made things work better. Also was looking at audacious2 and mplayer playing via Alsa. Both play fine except when dmix is used to play simultaneous - in my experimentation if the 'floatle' encoding is not used, there's a lot of choppyness.
Maybe install mplayer and all the codecs and play with -ao and -af options?
Regards, Srdjan
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 10:50:56PM +0100, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
On 23 April 2012 22:38, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 10:12:49PM +0100, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
On 23 April 2012 21:57, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote: I have an Acer Aspire One 751h which has a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/52837-20-sound-problem-acer-aspire-751h
But that's running Windows. I have left a small partition with Windows XP on it on the Acer and if I boot that it can run the BBC iPlayer streams in IE quite happily. So it looks as if it does have enough CPU to do it.
Exactly the same effect - intermittent playback. I'm using exaile to play it.
I've just tried parole, identical. Running top shows parole using around 21% of CPU with pulseaudio at 15%, parole occasionally goes higher on CPU usage.
Finally tried totem and that actually does a bit better, manages to play the MP3 almost acceptably, but top shows it using around 80% of CPU. Actually it's not all that good, several breaks in playback just now.
Hmm. Are all those using gstreamer as the back-end?
Presumably yes, I have a load of gstreamer plugins installed.
I had audio issues over the weekend when trying to find out why older games have sound lag or mute. Seems if I disable PulseAudio temporarily, it made things work better. Also was looking at audacious2 and mplayer playing via Alsa. Both play fine except when dmix is used to play simultaneous - in my experimentation if the 'floatle' encoding is not used, there's a lot of choppyness.
Maybe install mplayer and all the codecs and play with -ao and -af options?
What do you mean by "all the codecs"? I can install mplayer easily enough from the ubuntu repositories but I can't see any associated codecs.
OK, it's installed, resulting playback is pretty much similar to all the other applications.
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Chris Green -
Srdjan Todorovic