Improving the CPU usage of MPD (Music Player Daemon)
I have added format "48000:16:2" to the audio_output section and samplerate_converter 4 to the main body of ~/.mpdconf . This has reduced mpd's CPU usage from 30-40% to less than 5%! I should have done this before. I found out about this issue by doing web searches, but I have later encountered the neatly written summary linked below. In short: good quality (double?) software scaling is not very economical. http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Tuning