Hello my fellows. Before my trouble I'll tell you a little story. I'm a (not so happy) owner of a Audigy SE 7.1 soundcard, unable to do hardware mixing. I own a 7.1 home theater system, so to hear sound from all satellites I use an Alsa fake device to upmix 2.0 to a 7.1 stream, using the route alsa-plugin. As this uses a slave PCM that in fact is a multi PCM (surround71), the sound device gets locked everytime I listen to any sounds. That means I can't watch a video while hearing music, flash sounds won't work either... and worse: crossfading in media players refuse to work as well.
After months trying to figure out a way to hear sound with the deserved freedom in my PC the only solution I found was pulseaudio. Basically I route ALL sounds to pulseaudio by default, and pulseaudio routes to my fake upmix device. When I want to hear a 5.1 or 7.1 sound, like a DVD, I have to specify the surround71 or surround51 devices for that, and in the end I got my soundcard locked anyway. That was not a perfect solution, but I was happy enough not to break my crappy creative card apart. But I was not happy for long, so I began to be very very upset with a fact: as you can see, Amarok is now using 19% of my CPU, while pulseaudio is using 16: 13967 gucampos 20 0 179m 57m 28m S 19 5.7 0:14.51 amarokapp 14174 gucampos 20 0 18424 3488 2756 R 16 0.3 0:03.67 pulseaudio That's a top. The commom average is 10 for amarok and 8 for pulseaudio, which I still believe to be too much for my system (3.0Ghz Pentium 4 Prescott, 2x512 DDR400). I thought that the realtime priority of pulseaudio could be the problem, so I disabled it, and the problem remains. Google returns me lots of people complaining, but no actually solutions. Besides that, my sound now is a bit choppy sometimes, which I believe is pulseaudio's high cpu usage fault. My point is: Is there any way to tell pulseaudio not to eat my cpu that much? Or better: Is there a solution that would allow me to be a happy child without having to use pulseaudio and it's extra layer between me and my beloved hardware? You guys can't imagine how much I played with google and alsa without solution before I surrended to pulseaudio. If you show me a better solution I'll feel myself stupid, but happy. -- Gustavo Campos Ciência da Computação / Computer Science - UFMG -- [email protected] mailing list
