Spectrum Behaviour

[Cefn Hoile]

I've recently been working with the Spectrum element, (thanks for your
help on this) but trying to get it to work with relatively low-power
hardware. I'm wondering what I can do to minimise the processing load
of the spectrum element for a given FFT specification (with the same
interval and bands).

My pipeline currently looks something like this...
pulsesrc ! spectrum interval=40000000 bands=8 threshold=-80 ! fakesink

Whilst the pipeline configured in this way has practically
instantaneous updates on a quad core i7, it's taking up huge amounts
of CPU and running behind real time until it fails on a 900MHz machine
,with some kind of latency destroying the relationship between the
audio and the 'graphic equaliser' even before it fails. It's possible
to reduce the frequency of updates, which helps, but that impacts on
the visual effectiveness of the graphic equaliser.

I'm wondering for example if it's feasible to efficiently (and
lossily) downsample the audio and save effort in the FFT? Something
else I can do to make it more responsive?

Cefn
http:/cefn.com