Software Beat: Whamb!

I've been playing with Whamb 1.1.1 for the last few days, and it's really a nice piece of work. It's a cocoa mp3 player, and they've worked a ton of OSX specific technologies into it such as altivec, rendevous, straight coreaudio hooks, etc.

One of the best reasons for using OSX now for consumers is the integrated iApps that Apple has released, with iTunes being the venerable first. It has a great interface, and no one disputes that.

But it's nothing short of a resource hog, using 15-30%+ of your CPU depending on the options you have enabled and the mac you have. 15-30% of your CPU for playing mp3's is a bit of a joke compared to other platforms which might use 1-3% on average. This isn't that huge of a deal if you're just checking email or browsing the web, but as anyone knows the major content-creation apps for OSX are hogs in their own right and having 30% of your CPU power disappear in exchange for listening to music while you work just sort of sucks.

Whamb won't win any interface awards, although it does come with some very pretty skins. But the best part about it is that in normal use on my powerbook it uses about 7-8% of the CPU, which is less than half of what iTunes averages. Even better, if you hide Whamb while it is playing (apple key + h, or "hide whamb" from the Whamb menu) CPU usage drops to 3.5-5%, a large improvement. I've only noticed two real problems with it so far:

The first is that it allows you to create your own playlists from different folders, and it has a "smart" feature whereby when it starts up it automatically syncs the playlists with the folders. I have a huge CD collection (and 70+ gigabytes of mp3's) which means starting up whamb takes way too long while it syncs the folders.

The second happens whenever I try to change the sound output device from whamb, as doing so causes whamb to crash, although when it relaunches it has picked up the new setting. A crash isn't that big of a deal, but whamb takes so long to sync the folders when it starts up that it really grates. Lots of people aren't switching between headphones and external speakers a bunch throughout the day though so this may not be an issue to them.

So, kudos to the whamb team, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it and as soon as those two issues are fixed I'll purchase.