... but since I never give up, I managed to tweak the unallowed changing of the inherited Appointment (Affinity).
Below a few plots for Scheme-3 (must work out the others), noting that Scheme-3 plays sound on core 2, while the other processes are preferably on core 1.
The spikes represent the track load (hence the preprocessing of it), which went to core 2 with Scheme-3 before.
What I observe (or seem to, relative to how it was) is that there is plenty of headroom now for the 4-6 minute tracks which are loaded here. Normally the cpu shows a horizontal line at the top for the Doubled padded to 32 bits tracks (which for the before situation indeed would indicate some heavy working against itself e.g. heavy core cache switching). No squeezed toes in my shoes "will it do it" now. It just feels good.
Btw, Q1 is -2 here.
I'm near the end of Amused to Death now, and no single hiccup. Does this say anything ?
Oh, note the plots are at full throttle here, and TaskManager itself consumes the most cpu. The most flat lines in the right core are the most representative for what Engine#3 is doing. Where core 2 shows more activity, it's the "dying out" of other services being active at that moment. Picture 03 shows this from off the middle (the track load is not visible anymore (but for in the memory line, near the left).
In 01 vs. 04 (and 02 a bit) you can see that core 2 tends to help core 1. In 01 this apparently was not necessary. By itself this is good balance, because the paying thread now is on both cores temporarily ...