[Pkg-audacious-maintainers] Bug#613203: audacious: High CPU usage with snd_hda_intel based soundcard

[Fabien C.]

Package: audacious
Version: 2.3-2
Severity: important
Tags: upstream

CPU Usage is too high when playing audio files. Considering old bug reports and various internet sources, it seems to occur particularly with Intel HDA (snd_hda_intel) soundcards, the model I have on this box. 
On Intel Core2 CPU with "ondemand" governor (lowest freq.: 800Mhz) audacious consumes about 12 to 35-40% of CPU according to top while playing a file on a fresh Squeeze install. 
This behavior is apparently not new[*], and still it is not sure wheter it comes from a broken soundcard driver, alsa, or audacious. But other players do not have such behavior... 

The problem disappears if I change the ALSA Output plugin conf and manually select the PCM device as "front" (Front Speakers), but with this solution other apps are not able to play sound over audacious anymore. The soundcard is not available anymore for them. 

Anyway, while browsing the web[**] I found a workaround: 

Edit ~/.asoundrc and paste this resamplig stuff: 
------------
pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave.pcm {
    type dmix
    ipc_key 1024
    slave {
       pcm "hw:0,0"
       rate 44100
    }
  }
}
------------

Strange enough? :)

Fabien C. 


[*]  Archived bugs about audacious CPU usage (mid-2009) : #533559, #532081, #588633 
[**] http://boards.audacious-media-player.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=193 

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers squeeze-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'squeeze-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.37 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages audacious depends on:
ii  audacious-plugins      2.3+dfsg-1+b1     Base plugins for audacious
ii  dbus                   1.2.24-4          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  dbus-x11               1.2.24-4          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  gtk2-engines-pixbuf    2.20.1-2          Pixbuf-based theme for GTK+ 2.x
ii  libatk1.0-0            1.30.0-1          The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libaudclient2          2.3-2             audacious dbus remote control libr
ii  libaudcore1            2.3-2             audacious core engine library
ii  libaudid3tag2          2.3-2             audacious id3 tag manipulation lib
ii  libc6                  2.11.2-10         Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libcairo2              1.8.10-6          The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.2.24-4          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.88-2.1          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libfontconfig1         2.8.0-2.1         generic font configuration library
ii  libfreetype6           2.4.2-2.1         FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.24.2-1          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0            2.20.1-2          The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libice6                2:1.0.6-2         X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libmcs1                0.7.1-1           Abstraction library to store confi
ii  libmowgli1             0.6.1-1           a high performance development fra
ii  libpango1.0-0          1.28.3-1+squeeze1 Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libsm6                 2:1.1.1-1         X11 Session Management library

Versions of packages audacious recommends:
ii  unzip                         6.0-4      De-archiver for .zip files

audacious suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information