dBpoweramp FLAC to MP3 conversion speed?

[TheLastMan]

A simple question, if you use dBpoweramp I would be interested to know roughly how much time it takes you to convert a full CD's worth of FLAC files (say 350mb) to MP3 best quality 320kbps. This is assuming that both source and destination are on local hard drives not over ethernet or usb connections. To the nearest minute will do. Can you also tell me what processor you are using?

Currently on my very ancient AMD Athlon XP 3000+ it takes around 7 minutes.

A bit of an esoteric question I know, but hopefully there are a few out there that use this software to do this sort of thing.

This is not intended to be a competition, I am just as much interested in those with 2 or 3 year old processors as those with the latest kit.

Thanks for any help.

[garym]

A simple question, if you use dBpoweramp I would be interested to know roughly how much time it takes you to convert a full CD's worth of FLAC files (say 350mb) to MP3 best quality 320kbps. This is assuming that both source and destination are on local hard drives not over ethernet or usb connections. To the nearest minute will do. Can you also tell me what processor you are using?

Currently on my very ancient AMD Athlon XP 3000+ it takes around 7 minutes.

A bit of an esoteric question I know, but hopefully there are a few out there that use this software to do this sort of thing.

This is not intended to be a competition, I am just as much interested in those with 2 or 3 year old processors as those with the latest kit.

Thanks for any help.

gosh, I'm at work so can't test, but I'm recalling a matter of seconds (maybe total 1 minute) not multiple minutes for a flac > mp3 conversion in dbpa. This was true with my old laptop XP and my newer laptop WIN 7.

[tedfroop]

It does get faster with more cores as you rip as many songs as a time as you have cores. My two year old Core2 Quad (2.6) will do that in about 40 sec. ripping from one local drive to another. (with F@H running)

[maggior]

Last night I converted a box set of 18 discs in 22 minutes, which is 1.2 minutes per disc.

My configuration was converting over a wired network using my laptop (Dell Studio 15) which is only a couple of months old running Windows 7 64 bit edition on a i5 dualcore processor with hyperthreading.

The files source FLACs are on a Linux system made visable to my laptop via a SAMBA share. The generated mp3 files were written back to the same server via a SAMBA share.

Even though my setup doesn't match what you are doing precisely, it still gives you an idea of what a current processor will do for you. I was really pleased with transcoding performance when I bought this laptop.

[rbz5416]

I recently did a batch of 320GB on my HP WHS box & it consistently ran at 20x. Using your 350MB reference that would equate to around 2m 49s.

2.2GHz Celeron with 2GB RAM.

[olbiadle]

Intel Core i7 950, 16 GB RAM

385MB of FLAC to 320 kbps CBR MP3 on same drive.

Encoding set to Slow (High Quality): 39 seconds (peaked at 111x encoding, average 88x)
Encoding set to Normal: 24 seconds (peaked at 173x encoding, average 141x)
Encoding set to Fast (Low Quality): 17 seconds (peaked at 231x encoding, average 196x)

[TheLastMan]

Those replies give me a very good clue to what I can gain:

About twice as fast if using a dual core 2.2ghz Celeron. That is logical as my processor is 2.1ghz and a single core.

A bit more surprising that it gets x10 faster using a quad-core i7 which, presumably, is running at about 3ghz, so x1.5 the speed and x4 cores. 1.5 x 4 = 6 times faster. I imagine the 16GB RAM has something to do with that. I wouldn't go that route as I want to keep XP 32bit for the time being.

It is a bit of a dilemma for me, because this is just about the only thing I do on my computer that would benefit from this kind of speed upgrade (I don't play computer games). Everything else happens pretty well instantly anyway.

I record roughly two LPs a week to WAV files which then need encoding first to FLAC, which takes about 2 minutes, and then to MP3 (320kbps "slow" / best quality) which takes 7 minutes making a total of about 9 minutes of encoding per disk. If I could bring that down to 2 minutes I would save around 14 minutes a week, or 12 hours a year. Ripping CDs to FLAC is more limited by the speed the disk spins but I still have to do the FLAC -> MP3 encoding job.

Although the delays are frustrating, I am not sure I want to spend the £300 - £400 it would take to upgrade my PC with an i7. An AMD Phenom, mobo and 3GB memory would cost me around £200 and that would probably bring it down to around 2 minutes so that would probably give me the most bang for my buck.

[JJZolx]

Do you have LAME compute ReplayGain? I've found that this adds a lot of time to the processing. Also, embedding artwork is slower.

One thing you can do is encode to Mp3 on the side, rather than as you're ripping. A lot of people find that doing multiple encodings at the time of ripping is convenient. I don't. If you're experiencing the kind of times that you see, then it's not a very practical approach.

[TheLastMan]

Do you have LAME compute ReplayGain? I've found that this adds a lot of time to the processing. Also, embedding artwork is slower.

One thing you can do is encode to Mp3 on the side, rather than as you're ripping. A lot of people find that doing multiple encodings at the time of ripping is convenient. I don't. If you're experiencing the kind of times that you see, then it's not a very practical approach.

I don't convert to MP3 as I am ripping (as it always takes an age) or do replay gain. I do, however, embed the artwork. I will try with and without the artwork and see what the difference is. Thanks for the heads up.

For CD my workflow is to use dBpoweramp to rip to FLAC (compression level 5) with embedded artwork for my SqueezeBox library. If I have two or more CDs I do them back to back and then use the batch conversion tool to make the MP3 files for my iPod as this means I can go off and make a cup of coffee while it processes. A new processor would reduce my coffee intake!

For LP my workflow is use SpinItAgain to create WAV files for each track with tag data in the file name (it is a v. clever program doing about 90% of the work automatically). I then convert to FLAC with DBP and then Tag&Rename to convert the file names to tag data and embed artwork. I then convert the tagged FLAC files to MP3 the same way I do for CDs.

[olbiadle]

FYI - the Core I7 has 8 logical processors on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine - that's why you are so surprised at the 10x speed.