We should also drop in cpu usage with the switch to the new mp3 decoder; at one point we did some tests running only one or two threads with the realtime scheduler, as the rest don't really need it (which would probably make the cpu distribution more even for user tasks).

Interrupt latency doesn't suffer much with the player running, but some of the changes we've done to the kernel (I think in 1.01) help task wakeups, especially during caching, which could be very slow.

Hugo