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Audio players - some thoughts & RFC

 

 
Which audio player to use must  be about as controversial as which OS.  While I believe they should be 'heard and not seen', others require them to run their computer.
 Benchmarks alone are not going to find the best solution but can narrow the field down.  As Lubuntu is intended as a low resource OS, we need to find players that use as little CPU/RAM as possible while still retaining reasonable functionality.
 Some of us have, in the past, run various inconclusive tests.  Before Oscillating Ocelot, or what ever the release after Natty Narwhal is to be called, we develop a standard benchmark for everybody to use.  Basically this would involve everybody using the same music to carry out the measurements and also reporting the hardware used.
 In the tests myself, and others, have carried out it has become apparent that some players cope better in low memory environments than others.  Depending on the source and codecs used some players use far more resources than others.  While one may be very frugal with mp3 it's resource use can rocket with ogg, and vice-versa.  Some players cope very well with about a dozen albums but struggle when they have to cope with 10,000 tracks.
 So what we need is a standard set of tracks, in different formats and bit rates, for everybody to test with and a standardised set of tests and measurements so as to give a consistent set of results across different hardware.

Thoughts.


-- 
Steve Cook (Yorvyk)

http://lubuntu.net 



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