An update... Thanks to the help here I switched to http streaming and that solved the CPU usage issue, since no transcoding was going on. But despite CPU usage being below 20% I still experience random dropouts or pauses which I am unable to explain. These happen both with a laptop (GMPC) and androi...

Sounds really neat. Hoping to do the same - appreciate your help. Never used TVheadend so that will be next...

Also great to know that someone else is still using the N900 I still use mine as my all purpose music/radio player despite android... can't bear to part with it.

Pi+USB hard drive both powered by USB hub, connected to router by wired network connection. Flac files on USB drive, Pi running MPD now with http stream. No audio output device connected to the Pi at present I have been controlling MPD with gmpc from my (fedora) laptop and had been using deadbeef to...

Thanks Macey :) turns out I was simply trying to use the wrong player (deadbeef) - oops. Working with mplayer. Currently CPU use is between 15 and 20%. There are some hiccups eg when first starting to play but then it seems to settle down. Occasionally pausing still - maybe I should increase cache s...

Thank you. I added an http output to mpd and verified that it is icecast which causes the high CPU load - if I turn off the icecast stream mpd uses only about 3% CPU. So technically this is solved thanks. Unfortunately I cannot hear any http output :( so I need to troubleshoot that now! My mpd.conf ...

Many thanks, I will try this out as soon as I can. May I ask for a few more details of your setup please? -what format is the music stored in? I assume flac? (All my music is in flac). AFAIK Icecast only supports mp3 or ogg, so http would also suit me if this eliminates the transcoding overhead. -wh...

Please try it and post the results - I am out of better ideas

@ belthazar7 Icecast was better for me than that - the pauses tended to be consistently around 5-10 seconds, but the effect was not cumulative. The pauses were on average no more than once per song. So at least from my experience icecast was less problematic. I tried different quality settings as we...

Nothing yet - tried everything I can think of but no joy :( I wondered if there is something in the sound configuration but my skills are a bit too limited :) . I switched between alsa and pulse audio but that made no significant difference. In itself, high CPU is not an issue - however frequent 10 ...

Wondering if anyone can help point me at how to reduce the CPU load with MPD please. My Pi is running latest raspbian, headless through wired ethernet with a USB hard drive containing my music library. The files are shared with samba and also I have MPD running an icecast stream. The icecast stream ...