I just got a new macbook pro 15" with a Sandybridge quad core Core i7 and the playback of a 175kbps (VBR) mp3 (lame 3.90 encoded) uses ~14% of the cpu. That seems really high to me. I'm coming from a first generation Intel Core Solo 1.06Ghz ULV and music playback in Amarok on linux (using the phonon-vlc backend) never usually took more than 5%!!!!
I've tried iTunes, VLC, Vox, and Ecoute, and all give roughly the same results. So I guess it's the "streamer"/"backend" for audio in OS X 10.6.7 that's causing this absurd level of cpu usage for mp3 playback. Any ideas?
In fact, I just opened up the same audio file in a Kubuntu 11.04 as a guest virtualbox machine (my Mac the host) and played it in VLC and the cpu usage was ~8!
I've tried iTunes, VLC, Vox, and Ecoute, and all give roughly the same results. So I guess it's the "streamer"/"backend" for audio in OS X 10.6.7 that's causing this absurd level of cpu usage for mp3 playback. Any ideas?
In fact, I just opened up the same audio file in a Kubuntu 11.04 as a guest virtualbox machine (my Mac the host) and played it in VLC and the cpu usage was ~8!