On Sun, 6 Jul 2003, Diego Calleja [ISO-8859-15] García wrote:

> El Sat, 5 Jul 2003 23:09:12 +0200 Daniel Phillips <phillips@arcor.de>
> escribió:
>
> > The "better" mechanism for sound scheduling is SCHED_RR, which requires
> > root privilege for some reason that isn't clear to me.  Or maybe there
> > once was a good reason, back in the days of the dinosaurs.
>
> I don't think mp3 playing needs nothing special.
>
> Mp3 decoding on today's computers taks insignificant amounts of cpu time.
> Having mp3 skips even in light loads in a 2x800 box seems just
> unacceptable.

It is not a problem of CPU time spent, it is a timing problem. Many sound
players do use to feed the sound card with write()s that are typically
8-16Kb and it is sufficent 100-200ms of CPU black-out (at 44100 16bit) to
have a buffer under-run and an audio skip.



- Davide