I tried each and every beta release of foobar2000 2.X while both x86 and x64 versions were simply displaying the same error message as soon as foobar2000.exe was launched
https://www.dell.com...85/td-p/7333374
File System Error (16385).
No Event Viewer under Windows PE and therefore Windows Event Log couldn't be checked, 16385 might be related to Security-SPP but both Administrator and SYSTEM accounts were pretty much the same deal. As always "regular" versions of Windows 11 (i.e. 21H2 and 22H2) seemed to be OK, though. Supposedly it's a portable config since that's already provided by the official installer during the installation, of course we might check that "Modules" tab of System Informer but even a "portable" installation seemed to require quite a bit of stuff to run properly.
Version 1.6.12 worked just fine under Windows PE but most of us should prefer not to keep that SysWOW64 folder whenever possible, oh well.
Maybe we could go for this instead?
http://vv.uka.ru/aplayer_eng.html
https://www.hi-files...#comment-696106

For the sake of keeping the process audiodg.exe alive, it's really easy to find lightweight 32-bit players in order to minimize both CPU utilization and memory consumption etc.
Once again most of us would like to avoid that SysWOW64 folder as I mentioned above, that's why we'll need 64-bit ones instead. So far mpg123.exe seemed to be a pretty good candidate because of its memory footprint
https://www.portable...?p=95950#p95950
Link date PE size Memory Supported Extensions
MicroWav v1.0 31-12-2003 3,072 Bytes 5,464 K WAV
Gplay v1.0 12-10-2000 4,608 Bytes 6,268 K AVI MID MP3 WAV WMA
CmdMP3 v1.0 01-01-1970 26,397 Bytes 6,392 K AVI MID MP3 WAV WMA
CmdMP3win v1.0 01-01-1970 27,373 Bytes 6,392 K AVI MID MP3 WAV WMA
Serenity v3.41 17-07-2017 48,689 Bytes 6,876 K AVI MID MP3 WAV WMA RBS AAC
M3 v1.0 27-01-2009 102,427 Bytes 9,628 K MP3 WMA
MPG123 v1.25 04-01-1970 115,302 Bytes 3,300 K MID MP3 RBS WAV
1by1 v1.94 16-01-2020 197,000 Bytes 10,808 K MP3
STP v1.0 03-04-2001 213,504 Bytes 6,332 K MID MP3 WAV
The oldest versions of mpg123.exe turned out to be smaller than the latest ones, it's merely a tiny little bit of difference but somehow version 1.30.1 (despite the size of its executable) seemed to be the champion when I was looking for the one that would consume the least amount of RAM
https://mpg123.org/d...atic-x86-64.zip
https://mpg123.org/d...generic_fpu.zip
https://mpg123.org/d...tic-generic.zip
BTW, I extracted nothing but mpg123.exe from each *.zip file linked above while everything was working just fine.
When it comes to blank audio files (i.e. complete silence) with the smallest sizes, 8000 Hz should be the lowest playable frequency and thankfully they could be found online with ease
https://github.com/a...43265505b4a22ee
Both *.mp3 and *.wav files are supported by version 1.30.1 of mpg123.exe while it's always a good idea to compare both formats
https://archive.org/details/@praxthym
Playing *.mp3 would result in under 0.1% (i.e. going anywhere between 0.03% and 0.06%) of CPU utilization.
mpg123.exe --loop 100 -q 5minsilence.mp3
OTOH, the CPU utilization was actually hovering around 0.15% when I was playing *.wav linked above.
mpg123.exe --loop 100 -q 5minsilence.wav
Obviously such differences should be considered negligible and it's just a matter of satisfying my curiosity.
BTW, we could also find the source code of other interesting projects and here are some examples available on GitHub
https://github.com/e...asic-Mp3-Player
https://github.com/e...asic-Mp3-Player
https://github.com/c...teshark/PortAMP