Minimal, yes - but it needs to in real time at least enough to keep the buffer fed. On my 2Hz athlon machine - I occasionally get skips when playing mp3 if I'm doing something else (such as transcoding mpeg2 to DivX - or the opposite, going from DivX to mpeg2)
Especially when fetchmail pops my pop account and then has to pass it through SpamAssassin.
Just streaming the mp3 without unencoding is a lot easier on the cpu. It's true that most cpu cycles are thrown away, the problem is when you are utilizing the cpu and the process needs to be relatively real time to keep the buffer fed.
Are you sure you're cpu bound and not disk bound? The 2.4 disk elevator is a nightmare and the 2.6 default is not perfect either.
C.
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