need a tweak

[Kevin Buettner]

On Nov 2,  9:10am, Lucas Vogel wrote:

> Could there be anything else? Hardware/BIOS/Software misconfigurations? Is
> there memory upgrades I need to get? 

It's quite possible that there are other things you could do to help
eliminate the choppiness that you're hearing when playing MP3s.

More memory and faster hardware is of course one solution.  But you
told us at the outset that you had enough memory, so I didn't offer
that as an alternative.

I suggested using renice on your MP3 player to change its priority.
You didn't say whether that had any effect or not.

Here are some other ideas...

Run ``top'' to see what else is running while running your mp3
decoder.  Perhaps you have something running that you could do
without?

Run ``free'' and look at the "Swap" line.  Are you using any swap? 
Does your system seem to be paging?

Better still, run ``vmstat 1'' for a while to see what's going on.

You didn't tell us what kind of CPU(s) you have nor how fast they are. 
The speed of the CPU will likely make a sizable difference.

What type of sound card do you have?  I'm not an expert on the matter,
but I think that there are some which are more resource friendly
than others.  You may also want to try out the ALSA drivers instead
of the ones provided by default with the kernel.

Though it seems unlikely, another potential bottleneck could be your
disk.  (If you're not able to feed the mp3 decoder quick enough, it'll
be choppy.)  You may wish to play around with hdparm.

I'm sure there's still a bunch of other stuff you could try, but that
should be a start.