I’ve been using Audacity lately to monitor the line-in just an audio redirect so I can listen to another device through my PC speakers. Since I don’t need anything else from Audacity, I made the window as small as I could while still being able to access the Record Level VU to enable/disable monitoring. I was doing some other stuff and the system seemed sluggish. Checked task manager and saw that Audacity was using 25% CPU. (100% of a single core) I noticed that if I maximized the window it dropped back down to normal. After playing around a little bit, I found that I can make the window very small, but just not too small or the CPU jumps up. Not sure if it’s one of the toolbar or other GUI items that when it gets shrunk too much or becomes completely hidden that it gets stuck in something and uses up all the CPU.
Here’s a screenshot of two windows where one is slightly smaller and has the high CPU…
https://www.billybuerger.com/pub/AudacityHighCPU.png
Since I only want to be able to easily turn on/off the line-in playback, I don’t really need Audacity for this. It just is much easier than going through all the windows menus to turn on/off the “listen to this device” option. Seems like this is something that should exist but I haven’t been able to find any simple applications that just turn on/off the line-in pass-through. I made a really simple thing using NAudio to do the same but there’s lag and I haven’t figured out how to reduce that yet.