music stuff

It's strange that the one thing that makes me think I should upgrade my laptop are music player programs. Not web browsing (a tad slow, but just fine thankyou), or compiles (no problem), or even fullscreen mpeg video (pegs cpu but works fine), but simple mp3 and ogg players. Oh, they work, mostly, but all of the new ones seem to use 10% of my cpu to just sit there and play a music file.

I've mentioned my troubles getting rhythmbox to work well with my crusoe CPU before; changing the decoder backend made it use 1/3 the CPU power and be usable in power save mode. A few days ago I tried Quod Libet, which looks like a great player and some serious competition for rhythmbox, but uses 20% of my CPU! I edited the constantly updating scrollbar out of the code, which reduced it to 15%. Still not acceptable, sadly, not if I want everything else to work reasonably fast and the batteries to last longer than 4 hours.

The other thing I checked out the other day is this Audioscrobbler music-tracking service; while I have it running you can see what I'm listening to. I packaged rbscrobbler which lets it work with rhythmbox.