or you can get some low process eating program to listen to music, there's one that is always commented on but i cant remember the name that eats up extremely little memory and is great for such times
even running music through LFS can shatter your FPS (and also can put a dent into your harddrive if your not carefull, also i find that there is no point in converting stuff like that just for a game when you can run them through another program and not use up 2x the memory space )
That'd be cool if there was an AVISynth kind of program that could encode .ogg from .mp3 on-the-fly completely transparently to a host program. So you open up a fake file Streamer.ogg that in turn streams an mp3 to LFS in .ogg-style and uhh... kills your FPS and such
I run Media player in the background and use the media controls on the front of my laptop to control the music. Works pretty well and I only lose about 1-2frames on full settings so still doing around 35fps online with a ton of cars.
Something for the programmer brigade to do above though
I do the same on CNR servers (I don't listen to music while racing) It's really nice having media controls on my keyboard, and I don't really notice any FPS drop, then again I have WMP running most of the time anyway, just stopped.
I run Winamp on the background at it takes 0-1% power playing MP3s. I haven't noticed any drop in FPS (if there is, it must be only few FPS at most). I made my own control program to control WA from LFS (on/off, next track etc) and print the song names to LFS. The best thing in this is that any format WA support works (including net radio).
I wrote a lengthy post last night but accidentally closed opera right before I posted it, but I'll try to recreate it. Goes a little something like this:
Something must be wrong with your computer then. I use WMP11 with a 14GB music library of several thousand songs on an AMD Sempron 3100+ with 1GB RAM, and I never have an issue with its performance like that.
I did a little experiment: I opened up the three media players I currently have installed and loaded up the same 192kbps CBR 6.5MB WMA song in each. I minimized the players, played the song on one of them (while minimized), and after it played for about 4 minutes I took a screenshot with my task manager, My Music folder properties, and system properties visible.
First I did Media Player Classic. It's based on an old version of Windows Media Player but distributed on a GNU license with a bunch of nifty features. It's widely touted as being easy on resources and having a small memory footprint. While playing the track, MPC fluctuated between using 0% and 2% CPU, and about 6,300K RAM. While MPC was idle and the another player was working, MPC was using 7,812K and 7,832K; weird, even more than when working. illepall
Next I played the file on VLC Media Player, another of those small versatile players that I personally only really use for streaming live TV. VLC mostly fluctuated between 0% and 3% CPU use, and was taking up 7,860K RAM towards the end of the song. While idle, it was using 3,688K and 4,744K at the two sample points. Not bad at all.
Then I ran the horrible bloatware: WMP 11. It's officially still in beta as far as I know, but it's been stable for me for the few weeks I've been using it. While playing the file it hovered around 0-2% CPU use and topped out at 8,436K RAM use. Idling, it took up 3,248K and 4,780K in memory. Not too shabby.
After I had finished everything, I remembered another player I have installed that I don't really use at all. Nero Showtime; came with a bundle that I got for the CD/DVD authoring tools. I didn't bother screenshotting it but it used a similarly tiny amount of CPU and only about 6,000K RAM. Pretty good actually.
So what's the point of all this? Well it seems to me that for playing music in the background while doing other stuff, any of these players use an insignificant amount of resources - "bloatware" or otherwise. While WMP did use a little more RAM while playing a song minimized than the other two tested did, it seems like a very small difference to me. I really don't understand where all the anti-WMP propaganda comes from - at least not for the newest version. The only way I could make it use significant resources were if I played visualizations full-screen (TwistedPixel, a fantastic DirectX powered addon) or scrolled really fast through an enormous media library with album art and everything displayed. Even then though, it only used about 25-35% CPU.
I had tried out past versions of WMP and not been completely happy with them, so for the longest time I've been using Winamp. I ditched Winamp just recently though after playing around with WMP11 for a while. It looks slick, it syncs perfectly with my palmpilot/mp3 player, and it makes managing my media library easy and intuitive. These are things I care about. If you don't, that's fine, enjoy your player of choice; but the trash talking is silly.
Whoa: just noticed jakg you said 1000 kb/s WMA? I read that as 1,000KB before i.e. one MB filesize. You have audio files encoded at 1000kbps? That's crazy :o I thought only video+audio files could get that kind of bitrate. Oh that must be lossless compression I guess?
Ok, I just tried a 33MB 1.08Mbps lossless WMA file and CPU use mostly ranged from about 3% to 8%, but hit 10% two or three times. Memory use topped out at 16,556K. I can only assume this is basically typical of playing files of such high bitrate and filesize, because I don't feel like spending any more time on this
yup, thats a crazy size i know, but it's what i (used to) rip at, after converting it to 192 for my mp3 player, and then having to bring back all my music from my MP3 player at 192 because a botched Linux install overwrote it, i went to a "sensible" 192 kb/s
Oh - and your using Video players for your comparison, i did a test between the best freeware audio players (well, 2 then!) which used little memory, XMPlay and Foobar2000, ill see if i can dig it up
And yes, WMP didn't keep at 50% for long, but it did sit at ~5%. As an overclocker, knowing that all this time i spent tweaking to get an extra 5% out, and that WMP was just raping my resources, i gave over to XMPlay
ATM im listing to "Bestrafe Mich - Rammstein", a 5.2 Mb, 192 KB/s, 16 bit stereo and XMPlay is using 0% cpu usage (i'd geuss that means very low, as Process Explorer says 0% too, and that does decimals!), spiking to 2 every now and again, using 9.1 mb of ram. This is with all my plugins and skins, so not to shabby!
Lets just try that in WMP...
stays around 2, drops to 1, jumps to 4 fairly often. memory usage? 37 mb?!?! (WMP11 btw)
Foobar2000? 0% cpu usage normally, jumps to 2% every now and again, 16 mb of RAM
so, lets summarise
XMPlay - ~0.5% CPU - 9.1 MB RAM
Foobar - ~0.5% CPU - 16 MB RAM
WMP11 - ~2.5% CPU - 37 MB RAM
)
Goes a little something like this: 
illepall 
