Hi Shasha.. can you take a look if there's other applications also fighting for cpu? Indeed canola is cpu intensive, but when it's on the background it shouldn't be that heavy. Are you listening to some kind of audio that is using media player instead of default media player?

Can you try modifying atabake config to use OMS instead of mplayer. this reduces the load as the default player usually is lighter then playing mplayer.

Also : what kind of audio files are you listening to?

Marcelo