[SWLUG] tweaking for sound performance

[swlug at azem.org]

On Monday 12 July 2004 11:41 am, Dick Porter wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 00:07, bascule wrote:
> > what, if any, tweaks might there be to improve sound performance
> > on an old system with a slow processor and an isa soundcard, the
> > card is an sb32awe which was quite reasonable in its day, the
> > processor an amd 5x86 - unknown speed - , the machine has no
> > other purpose but to play mp3s, the decoding of which i think is
> > the reason it's being pushed just a little beyond its
> > capabilities,
>
> Should be plenty of cpu power for mp3 there.  My old pentium-120
> was quite capable of playing mp3s on the sb32awe while it encoded
> others.

I agree, however it does depend on what else the machine is running.  
my 386 mp3 player plays 160kbs mp3s and oggs quite happily from a 
datastore on my network, however, i most point out that this machine 
does not run X , the mp3 menu is a shell script calling mpg123 or 
ogg123, this script has been developed over some time to give 
playlist functionality and reads the meta tags in the files, and can 
be operated remotely as my house has a pair of speakers in every room 
and can potentialy also stream across the net.  

What distro are you running, have you concidered completely gutting it 
and starting with an LFS?

stu