How these were measured

The PC and the players

• An AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8 cores, 16 logical processors) with 32 GB of memory, running Windows 11 Pro for Workstations, build 26300.
• featherplay 0.1.0, the release build that's offered for download: the exe is 28.20 MB, the installer 10.13 MB.
• Pear Desktop 3.12.0, installed, with its owner's settings left as they were.
• YouTube Music in Microsoft Edge 156.0.4314.58: a separate Edge with a clean profile of its own and no extensions, one tab, signed in.

How each one ran

• The same song in all three, on repeat, at normal volume.
• Each was the only player running. Pear Desktop stayed open but paused while Edge was measured, and wasn't counted.
• The window was minimised to the taskbar, and the PC was otherwise lightly used, with no games running.
• Five minutes playing, then three minutes paused, with a sample every 5 seconds.

What's counted

• Every process each player runs: 1 for featherplay, 6 to 7 for Pear Desktop and 9 to 11 for Edge. Edge's are picked out by the profile folder, so no other Edge window gets counted.
• Memory is private memory, the memory those processes keep for themselves, averaged over the run. It's in MB as Windows counts them: 1 MB is 1,048,576 bytes, here and for every size on the site.
• CPU is a share of the whole processor: the CPU seconds the processes used, divided by the seconds measured, divided by the 16 logical processors.
• Download is what you download to install it: featherplay's installer (or the 28.20 MB portable exe), Pear Desktop's 274 MB installer. Edge comes with Windows, so there's nothing to download.
• The two folders under the comparison are Pear Desktop's install folder on the same PC, listed on 1 November 2026 (105 files, 396 MB), and featherplay's portable exe. Source: pear-install-folder-2026-11-01.md. Installed, featherplay's folder is the same exe plus its uninstaller (about 4.2 MB, source: installer.md), so its installed size is given as an approximation.

Left out, and measured again

Three runs were thrown away and done again:

• featherplay's first playing run, because the sound device changed partway through.
• Edge's first playing run, because playback had stalled.
• Edge's second playing run, because a rounding bug in the script's CPU column spoiled its CPU figure. The bug is fixed. That run's memory, 999 MB, agrees with the run that's used.

The scripts

Three PowerShell scripts took the samples and wrote them to CSV files: measure-pid-hwnd.ps1 for featherplay, measure-pear.ps1 for Pear Desktop and measure-edge.ps1 for Edge, which reads each process's CPU time from Windows' own process list (Win32_Process).

Every figure and its source