Hi all, i was searcing for an iTunes alternative in Windows and i've found Songbird ( http://www.songbirdnest.com/ ), how many kinds of success we should have trying to compile it on OS/2 or eComStation due his dependence from mozilla code? Songbird can connect/transfer songs to an iPod using a plug-in, and can manage library exactly like iTunes ;D !!
Yes, but songbird is also kind of a piece of crap. Its much improved over its earlier stages, but it is still not very good. Its very bloated and slow. :(
Edit: That is not to say that it would not be a welcome and much needed addition to OS/2, but simply that you are going to have a not so pleasant surprise upon using the tool. Barbara, if you would like to use a truly quick/simple yet powerful media manager (no ipod support) for playback on windows, try Tuniac. Development has been stalled, but I've found it to be the best media manager by far. See my "Proposed Enhancements for PM123" thread for more details and a few pictures of it.
Alright, I felt the need to substantiate my claims that songbird is a fat turkey, and boy, was I right. 200MB of usage? spiking to 30% CPU usage just during playback? Come now. Thats worse than iTunes, what this is an alternative to. It is quite pretty however, and does have many good features... Hmm.. A tough call. It does limit its platform to XP/VISTA, so there may be some hidden dependencies we need to wrestle with in there.
For contrast, I have included a screenshot of Tuniac working with my full library, take a look at CPU time and Memory usage. Quite a different tale no?
And finally, because everyone hates Microsoft, I have included WMP11 working with my library as the final comparison. Its as sleek in usage as it looks. It would seem the mantra of the MS hate mongers is wearing a bit thin now, wouldnt it?
Oh, yes, Songbird should be better than now, and personaly i use PM123 and z! Player in eCS, and z! in Windows, iTunes only to manage my iPod from now, than is new ( but very slow :( ). I've also an iBook G4, but all my favourite libraryes are on Win (and my iPod was formatted by the iBook), but Songbird seems to be the only one that can be ported and that can manage an iPod under eCS. In the next future ;) ?
About memory usage, this is Z! Player on my Windows, the OS/2 software is always better :P !!
Z! Player is just a simple VIO Player, its not fair to compare to a GUI player :P Also, Z hides its usage in Virtual Memory.
Also, I talked with Tonymillion (creator of Tuniac) and he has started to develop Tuniac again! (announcement posted 1/29/08). I asked him if he would mind us making a Tuniac/2 so we can have such a great player on OS/2, I wait for his response now :)
Wow, should be a great news ;D !!
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.02.03, 21:31:04
Z! Player is just a simple VIO Player, its not fair to compare to a GUI player :P Also, Z hides its usage in Virtual Memory.
What I think you are actually seeing is how much memory Z! is using (or allocated) to buffer the stream you are playing. Z! in and of itself, uses near nothing (memory-wise) to play music files on either Windows or eCS.
-Rob
Yeap, I know that, but I was comparing all the players in terms of their memory usage in phyiscal and VM both, and Z! takes the cake in terms of VM usage. Thats not to say Z is hog, its not, but to be fair, it needed to be compared in like with the other players.
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.02.04, 05:34:54
Yeap, I know that, but I was comparing all the players in terms of their memory usage in phyiscal and VM both, and Z! takes the cake in terms of VM usage. Thats not to say Z is hog, its not, but to be fair, it needed to be compared in like with the other players.
Ummm... turn down how much it buffers? Or test them all from disk loaded content? :)
-R
:) Point taken, same usage however :(
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.02.04, 05:56:22
:) Point taken, same usage however :(
That is very weird... I wonder if that's a bug. Did you shut down and restart Z!? If so, it's gotta be a weird bug in the Windows version. I use Z! (minus a few reboots) nonstop (it plays music in my room 24/7 - for the last 2 years, whether I am there or not) and that's on a machine with less total memory available on boot than Z! is using on your system. But that's the Warp version (hence my thoughts on it being a bug in the Windows version).
I don't have a Windows machine handy right now, so I cant see if it's something specific to the version you are using. You might wanna send Dink an email (or post a question in his message boards). He's a pretty personable guy.
-Rob
Hi all,
just to set some things straight: you should be using VM-size + Mem size as an indication of the memory usage of the process. VM size is everything you want to know, and it overlaps with Mem size (which is the current working set of the app). Sometimes (see Songbird) Mem size can be higher than VM size, but this is a particular and temporaneous situation and it doesn't really affect the calculation.
Second: you can't simply use those columns to say something about memory usage when it comes to programs included in the OS (see Media Player): those programs share large portions of code and memory with system components, so you don't have a realistic picture of their memory usage (I can show you screenshots of IE using 2Mb of memory in the Mem size).
I have some pages explaining very carefully what those columns (VM size and Mem size) mean, but they are in italian :-)
Bye
Cris
Yes, you are right Cris, but I saw no correlative increase in VM or Memory usage (nor CPU time) in any other process than wmplayer.exe, although the SVCHOST.exe (one instance) was in use by WMP upon startup to check for codecs/player updates, however, my screenshots were taken after WMP had detached from using SVCHOST for its auto-updates routine, and as such, I think what I have captured there is a pretty close estimate of its actual usage, no?
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.02.04, 18:59:55
Yes, you are right Cris, but I saw no correlative increase in VM or Memory usage (nor CPU time) in any other process than wmplayer.exe, although the SVCHOST.exe (one instance) was in use by WMP upon startup to check for codecs/player updates, however, my screenshots were taken after WMP had detached from using SVCHOST for its auto-updates routine, and as such, I think what I have captured there is a pretty close estimate of its actual usage, no?
Not at all actually. Much of the software MS writes uses code loaded already by the OS, so you wont see what the program is actually using. Doesnt matter how you start the app, the support DLLs were already loaded (and UNloadable) on boot.
If that is the case, isn't that a good thing in terms of performance and streamlined usage?
Yes, it is. That's the whole point behind DLLs. At least until you find that you have tons of unneeded DLLs loaded in memory because someone (MS) decided you HAD to have the whole IE engine in memory just to use your desktop, even if you use Firefox (or any other browser) to surf the web. That it suddenly turns into a waste: basically you are forced to have to engines in memory but using only one.
Yes, I know... the one that's not used will soon have most of its pages swapped to disk, but that's not the point: it's a waste.
Note: this is not a fault in the way things are written, rather in the way MS forces you to do things the way THEY want instead of the way YOU want.
O_o. I seem to recall seeing "idle RAM is wasted RAM" as an adage somewhere. Also, the above does not really seem to be a problem for me. XP idles at about 150mb of usage, which from my tests puts it under eCS @ idle. I even have paging turned off on XP & I have never run into an issue with free memory, not even while playing Crysis @ max resolution or playing Quake 4 @ max resolution with 512mb+ allocated for just texture memory. As for IE being in memory, it makes sense considering explorer uses many of the features of IE and its like complaining Konquorer is in memory on KDE when you may use firefox. Well, thats how you view/access your computer, so.. makes sense IMO.
Saijin,
"idle ram" is really a ridiculous sentence with today's software, and when it comes to XP (true in general with MS OSes) is almost an oxymoron.
I don't really know where your statistics come from, or how do you work with your system, but you won't find XP working or even booting with 150Mb anywhere, at least not where *real* work is done. Yes, it can probably be done as an experiment, but nothing more.
Here at work (XP Professional on every box, thousands of them) my colleagues who maintain workstations are always pressed to add more RAM. My system (1Gb of RAM) _starts_ with about 40% of RAM occupied, and normal work lies between 80 and 90 % of occupied RAM and more than 50% of swap usage (as reported by RainMeter).
To have eCS idle at _more_ than XP I don't really know what you're doing to your operating systems (both).
Regarding IE (and KDE too) in the GUI: that's what I call bloat. But even if you like it, you should be able to remove it. Linux offers a much wider array of choices. Moreover, IE engine is not modular, while the feature set you need for the GUI is vastly inferior to what is needed for a web browser to work.
Bye
Cris
What do you do for real work? And yes, my XP box boots and runs fully loaded with about 26 processes and 150some MB of RAM usage. When I had 2k, it was 19 processes and 90MB. With XP Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, it boots to desktop with 64-80MB of RAM usage. I know how to get performance from Windows, I am a gamer, and have had to use sub-par equipment to game my whole life, thus, I learned to tweak my equipment to get me performance. I get my statistics from the Help-> Product Info (in eCS) and the task manager in Windows XP, or, use a program and get the Help->About dialog which is the same thing as the eCS product info dialog.. I got eCS booting a bit more lean by tweaking my threads, but it still seems to idle with more usage than my XP. Now, without using NVC with eCS, it idles at 192 on the desktop, down from 300+ it used to be.
Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.02.09, 16:45:04
What do you do for real work? And yes, my XP box boots and runs fully loaded with about 26 processes and 150some MB of RAM usage. When I had 2k, it was 19 processes and 90MB. With XP Fundamentals for Legacy PCs, it boots to desktop with 64-80MB of RAM usage. I know how to get performance from Windows, I am a gamer, and have had to use sub-par equipment to game my whole life, thus, I learned to tweak my equipment to get me performance. I get my statistics from the Help-> Product Info (in eCS) and the task manager in Windows XP, or, use a program and get the Help->About dialog which is the same thing as the eCS product info dialog.. I got eCS booting a bit more lean by tweaking my threads, but it still seems to idle with more usage than my XP. Now, without using NVC with eCS, it idles at 192 on the desktop, down from 300+ it used to be.
Well, OS/2 is highly threaded - and that's not a problem. OS/2 handles threads differently than Windows, and has a much higher control over thread and process prioritization (also to a much higher degree). OS/2 runs as many threads and processes because it was designed that way, while the NT line was designed to minimize such use because it doesnt handle such as well.
As for CPU utilization, OS/2 should use near no CPU utilization when threads or processes are idle (using TOP, btw, will NOT indicate that, because it indicates how much of the USED CPU utilization is allocated to a specific process - so, for instance, if your CPU is at 1%, the total in the list on TOP will be 100%, with potentially one process showing some or all of that - ie: 100% CPU utilization - which actually translates into 100% of that 1% the CPU is actually using).
Memory utilization is something else entirely - and OS/2 will use a different amount depending on what is available. My WSeB laptop has 320MB total, and on boot has about 200MB available... my HP desktop with 500MB of RAM has 300MB available on boot - both running the same version of WSeB with the same components installed. My Netfinity (with 4GB installed) uses about 400MB on boot (though it does have more running, like the WSeB server components).
Why (does OS/2's memory usage vary so much) you ask? I dunno. Perhaps someone here with more knowledge in that area could answer that... but it does seem to scale it's memory usage up (or down) nicely to the amount of memory available.
-Robert