Winamp Hogging CPU
Recently my notbook has been performing slower than it used to. High CPU usage, jerky mouse cursor, music stuttering while compiling Java code, not good. I though it was a disk issue (had a small “data lost” scare a few days ago), but no, it was problem between chair and keybord. I’d misconfigured Winamp after upgrading to version 5.21.
In earlier versions of Winamp there was an option to set the size of the file read buffer. I had this set quite high in an attempt to reduce disk access while running on battery. In Winamp 5.21 this setting didn’t seem to exist. I looked all through Preferences and couldn’t find it, but I hadn’t looked hard enough.
While stuffing around in Preferences I had accidently configured it to use the Nullsoft Disk Writer plug-in for output. Turns out that this plug-in writes your MP3/Ogg files to disk as rather large uncompressed WAV files while they play.
A post on the Winamp Forum suggested that I should use the DirectSound plug-in for output on Windows XP. After taking the time to select the DirectSound plug-in (see image), and configure it, my user experience is as expected.
[tags]winamp, directsound, cpu[/tags]