I’ve noticed a substantial hit to the frame counter when I’m playing an MP3. I have ‘stream audio’ and ‘Use Hardware Decodin’ on.
Shouldn’t mp3 playback be basically free? Is this because of streaming?
depends on if the bug that was previously present was solved (it didn’t use the hw decoder even with just one stream)
also keep in mind that if you have more than one mp3 thats meant to use the hw decoder, it will disable the hw decoder likely.
Yes - it was because of streaming. So I have to keep the mp3 entirely resident in memory to get it ‘for free’?
… Grumble.
I was kind of looking forward to running protracker/screamtracker 
as mentioned it could just as well be that the HW decompressor usage is still bugged (it didn’t work in b4 and before and didn’t check the b5 logs that much on this matter)
Thats after all what beta / preview version declares, not production ready 
But yeah if you want it at little to no cpu cost you must use uncompressed
and if you want more than 1 mp3, then naturally too as the hw decompressor does not support more than 1 stream at a time