It might be faster to find a module to play the sound, instead of running an external process. It takes more time to start up a new process than for your program to do something itself.

You could try waking up slightly before you actually want to play the sound, then reading the sound into memory, going into a tight loop briefly, or doing something else that will make sure your program is all ready to go by the time it needs to be.

You could also try to shut off, pause, or kill xscreensaver from your script.

In reply to Re: making something happen in real time by sgifford
in thread making something happen in real time by bcrowell2

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