Re: realplayer10 and sound quality
On Saturday 25 June 2005 21:52, Joe Mc Cool wrote:
> Sarge, kernel 2.2.20, small home network. Server: PII
> 333MHz.
>
> Thanks a lot for Debian.
>
> I have just installed RealPlayer10 and it works fine,
> listening on line to BBC Radio 3. Wonderful, thanks
> again everybody.
>
> But this is when only one person is logged on. If,
> say, another user is moving his mouse a lot, then the
> sound quality nosedives.
>
> Any suggestions ?
>
> Perhaps I "looking jam on it" :-)
>
> Joe
PII 333MHz isn't exactly a top-of-the-line machine these
days. It may be your machine just isn't keeping up.
You could try modifying the "niceness" of your sound
daemons, or of RealPlayer (but I think you have to be
root to increase niceness, certainly you have to be to
modify the "niceness" of an existing process)
man nice to see what I'm talking about. Essentially it
means that the "natural" priority level can be raised
to encourage Linux to give more processor time to your
sound. If your box is struggling under the load (as
evidenced by the fact that your sound is going down the
toilet) though, the likelihood is that even if this
works it will be at the expense of your other user
waving his mouse pointer around... (S)he'll start
complaining to you of jittery mouse movements or
whatever they are actually doing.
There are flavours of the kernel that provide more
control over process scheduling, but you need to be an
expert to go down that path, basically.
I'm afraid I can't think of anything else other than
trying to reduce the load on your machine of other
daemons / apps taking up the processor. Could your
memory be full and could Linux be doing a lot of paging
to disk? If so that takes time and hangs up resources
which could, if it gets bad enough, start affecting
your sound subsystem's ability to do its job.
Bottom line, which probably isn't what you want to hear,
is either your CPU is not cutting it or your memory
isn't. If you are tight on memory consider adding some
(you can use the top command to see how much paging to
disk is going on) and if you're not, time to buy a
faster machine...
Mark
Reply to: