On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Julio Merino wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 11:46:45AM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Julio Merino wrote:
> >
> > xmms is a real processor hog, especially with the window dressing turned
> > on. Check "top" while it's running the O-scope thingy. Maybe your
> > hardware just can't handle it. It also tries to keep the sound
> > hardware's buffer full, so it doesn't ever have to block, but if your
> > soundcard has a very small buffer, all that extra calculation would just
> > increase the load on the system. I'm guessing "mpg123" just rams bytes
> > into the audio device, and blocks until they're played out.
>
> It works very well on other os'es, like FreeBSD or Linux. I only have this
> problem in NetBSD.
> My soundcard, a SB16 ISA PNP. Hardware: Pentium2 266, with 320 of ram.

The difference is possibly the native pthread support in FreeBSD and
Linux. Can you run, say "squeak"? Squeak uses a similar strategy to
handle interactivity while the sound is playing, but no pthreads. The
cartoon singers in the demo may stress your playback capability, but if
they work for you, maybe you can find a fancy mpeg player for squeak, as
sound is supposed to be one of it's strong points.

Frederick