levi
Still fresh, damnit!
Re Pulseaudio, it was firefox's insistence that I need to have pulseaudio installed to listed to html5 audio that finally made me go to the effort of installing it. And then after I broke my headphone jack and replaced it using a USB sound card, I first of all fixed the ALSA config to use that card by default, but it turned out pulse audio didn't inherit that config. But in the end I was able to fix that by installing and running pavucontrol, then choosing the usb card on the third tab.
Testing it now, mplayer using alsa gives me a very smooth update of the time progressed so far in playing an mp3, while started with the '-ao pulse' option to use pulseaudio, the display is much less smooth. In terms of the audio, playing a 44.1kHz source file through a presumably 48k only cheap usb card, the two sound more or less indistinguishable through my headphones, and looking at the CPU usage in htop, under ALSA mplayer uses over four times the CPU power than it does over pulseaudio, although in the latter case, the pulseaudio processes are also active - they're using less CPU than mplayer combined though, so in total I reckon it's using less than half the CPU power. Using a speech based podcast instead, it looks as if mplayer uses even less power under pulseaudio, but about the same under ALSA. I might end up configuring mplayer to use pulseaudio by default at this rate!
Testing it now, mplayer using alsa gives me a very smooth update of the time progressed so far in playing an mp3, while started with the '-ao pulse' option to use pulseaudio, the display is much less smooth. In terms of the audio, playing a 44.1kHz source file through a presumably 48k only cheap usb card, the two sound more or less indistinguishable through my headphones, and looking at the CPU usage in htop, under ALSA mplayer uses over four times the CPU power than it does over pulseaudio, although in the latter case, the pulseaudio processes are also active - they're using less CPU than mplayer combined though, so in total I reckon it's using less than half the CPU power. Using a speech based podcast instead, it looks as if mplayer uses even less power under pulseaudio, but about the same under ALSA. I might end up configuring mplayer to use pulseaudio by default at this rate!