Hi everyone,

I felt I had to mention I found a much improved version of the mgp123 app, in the source tree of the Perl module, called Audio-Play-MPG123-0.62......

First off, the reason I'm telling you this is I found that the original has a streaming problem, albeit a slight one on my Athlon 900 box, and I had to boost it's priority a bit to overcome it (renice -7).......

I've also tried the mpg123 clone, called mpg321 (which is the default app in Slackware), and found that it contains a memory leak which affects the X server (don't ask me why this is so since it's a command line util). It seems after playing a directory full of songs for a couple of days straight, my desktop became very, very slow, and 'top' showed the X server using over 90% of the CPU time (a problem I've never encountered before using the mpg321 app).........I also noticed right off that I had to decrease mpg321's priority from the start (renice +5) since it was affecting my surfing the net, and loading other programs a little bit.....

It's important to note that I was only running them as a background process from the command line (no GUIs).................Then I came across the modified source I mentioned above.........I compiled this by itself, which is the recommended procedure anyway from the source instructions for the Perl module, and have been playing songs for more than a day continuously and encountered no problems whatsoever........I didn't even have to fool with the priority settings..........And some of you may not realize that mpg123 is the back-end for some of those popular GUI multimedia apps out there, so this should help out in that respect also......

You can download that source from CPAN (the main site for Perl modules) here: Marc Lehmann / Audio-Play-MPG123................Unpack the compressed tarball, and enter the mpg123 subdirectory and run, make && make install. There's no configuring to do other than editing the Makefile and change a few options at the top of the file, mostly for IPv6 capability or change the PREFIX from /usr/local to something different. That's it!.........By default, the mpg123 binary is installed in /usr/local/bin and the man page is installed in /usr/local/man/man1.........(You don't need to install the Perl module, unless you want to... )

Anyway, I hope this will be of some help to you.....

Enjoy,
---thegeekster