I can give more of an insight now thanks to your tool. It's populating the playlist and that's causing the CPU to go into overdrive as I have thousands of tracks. Here's a snapshot example of what's going on when I am playing normally from part of the monitor tool:
": 88}, "playlistid": 0, "position": 85} [Head Over Feet (Alanis Morissette)]
2014-04-21 14:37:23.815221: Playlist.OnAdd : {"item": {"type": "song", "id": 89}, "playlistid": 0, "position": 86} [Ironic (Alanis Morissette)]
2014-04-21 14:37:24.166339: Playlist.OnAdd : {"item": {"type": "song", "id": 90}, "playlistid": 0, "position": 87} [Jagged Little Pill (Alanis Morissette)]
2014-04-21 14:37:24.531890: Playlist.OnAdd : {"item": {"type": "song", "id": 91}, "playlistid": 0, "position": 88} [Thank U (Alanis Morissette)]
2014-04-21 14:37:24.914522: Playlist.OnAdd : {"item": {"type": "song", "id": 92}, "playlistid": 0, "position": 89} [You Oughta Know (Alanis Morissette)]
2014-04-21 14:37:25.298798: Playlist.OnAdd : {"item": {"type": "song", "id
Now if I am only playing one album there might only be a handful of tracks so these are all queued up to play after a few seconds so the playback is normal.
If on the other hand I want to randomly play my entire collection, I hit 'songs' and this starts sending the playlist into overdrive. Monitor shows hundreds of events as each track is queued up. I wondered if this was to do with the shuffle feature so I turned shuffle off, rebooted and monitored but the same result happened. Even after I stop MP3 playback, monitor keeps reporting the playlist is still building and the only two ways to stop this easily is either once the playlist has loaded all my MP3's or if I reboot XMBC.
I can now understand why MP3 playback is poor as it's doing so much work. What's the way around this?
Thanks