Day 4 with Amarok, and I have to say, this is officially one of those \'killer\' apps so-called linux guru\'s talk about. Anyway enough praise - I\'ve been following the aRts debate and completely understand that GStreamer is more actively developed and all-round better BUT no matter how hard I try, with all combinations of settings, GStreamer averages at 7 - 30% CPU usage, whereas aRts peaks at 3%. On top of that, crossfading in Gstreamer gives a half second skip between tracks with a nice CPU spike.

This isn\'t a problem, as aRts works great and I\'m happy. But somebody tell me how I can be a cool GStreamer kid and not a sappy aRts geek!

The skipping issue is fixed in CVS.

Ruddy Marvellous!

I love you all.

I find the xine backend to be the easiest on the CPU. On my rather old PIII/850, it averages at 4-5%.

i also find xine engine the most stable and easy on cpu.plays almost all the formats including wma out of box.