Speed to Expect in MC9 Ripping

[Stensvaag]

I'm new but searched the old forums without success. I've installed the trial version of MC9, Version 9.0170, in preparation for receiving my first Ipod (the new 30 GB version) next week. I'm having difficulty with ripping, even though I've used other software before to do so.

I have a Creative 12-10-32X drive that can burn a CD in 8 minutes. But no matter how I set MC9, ripping takes forever. I've got the following settings: Digital Large Buffer, Read Speed Max, MP3 Encoder VBR Custom "alt-preset standard." Ripping a 2:12 minute track takes 8:49 minutes. Ripping the same track with WinAudio Basic, my old standby, takes approximately 2:12 minutes in 192kb/s in constant bit mode; I can't get that other program to work in VBR mode, but that's another story.

Are the times I'm getting with MC9 reasonable? It's gonna take forever to rip 400 CDs. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[TimB]

Originally posted by Stensvaag
I'm new but searched the old forums without success. I've installed the trial version of MC9, Version 9.0170, in preparation for receiving my first Ipod (the new 30 GB version) next week. I'm having difficulty with ripping, even though I've used other software before to do so.

I have a Creative 12-10-32X drive that can burn a CD in 8 minutes. But no matter how I set MC9, ripping takes forever. I've got the following settings: Digital Large Buffer, Read Speed Max, MP3 Encoder VBR Custom "alt-preset standard." Ripping a 2:12 minute track takes 8:49 minutes. Ripping the same track with WinAudio Basic, my old standby, takes approximately 2:12 minutes in 192kb/s in constant bit mode; I can't get that other program to work in VBR mode, but that's another story.

Are the times I'm getting with MC9 reasonable? It's gonna take forever to rip 400 CDs. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. As MC9 uses the LAME engine for MP3s it is a little slower (and higher quality) but this is WAY slow.

I just ran a 2:12 track on a 12/10/32 drive with the settings you describe, at Digital Large Buffer I get a 30 second burn with 4.0 speed, with Digital Secure (my preference) I get a 1:10 minute burn with 2.8 speed.

I'm assuming that your "alt-preset standard." is a typo as the actual correct argument is "--alt-preset standard" minus the quote signs

-=Tim=-

[TimB]

However there's another forum member who's far more of an ace on ripping settings than I am who might be able to shed more light on this situation. :)

-=Tim=-

[Stensvaag]

Yes. That is the setting I'm using, as you say. Wish it had been something so simple.

>>I'm assuming that your "alt-preset standard." is a typo as the actual correct argument is "--alt-preset standard" minus the quote signs :)<<

[naanbread]

What is the speed of your computer?

Most speed issue with lame are not due to ripping speed but encoding speed. MMJB frannhoufffer codec encodes very fast but that is its only benifit over lame.

use

--alt-preset fast standard. To see if that makes any difference.

If it does not than it should be your ripping speed.

I have only one sudgestion for this. Goto windows devise manager and find you ide controllers, right click on the one that is controlling your cd drive (ie primary or secondry) and go to properties. Click on advanced settings. If it says "pio only" in the transfer mode section change it to "dma if avialable", it made my drive not only rip faster but genrally copy faster. It has no effect on writing speed tho.

If you can not follow this I will reply with more detail.

[Joe]

Wow... that is slow... What are you using, a Pentium 90MHz... seriously, there must be something wrong. The LAME encoder will take a little longer to encode, but offers much better quality that the Fh codecs. But it shouldn't take anywhere near that long on a somewhat recent computer.

[Stensvaag]

Thanks for the advice given by several of you. When I first posed this question, I was ripping-encoding at 0.3x rate. By making several changes, I am now very consistently up to 0.9x or 1.0x rate for ripping-encoding, which is a huge improvement. For others, here is what I did:

Changed IDE/CDR controller from "PIO Only" "DMA if Available"
Changed Digital Secure to Digital Large Buffer
Changed --alt-preset standard to --alt-preset fast standard

I never would have stumbled on this combination of fixes without help, so I'm very grateful to each of you who chimed in for advice.

For the record, I have a 550 MHz Compaq Pressario with 188KB RAM (yea, it won't hold any more:( ). I can live with 1.0x ripping-encoding.

[Stensvaag]

As a final follow up. On a different desktop computer at my office (similar memory and speed), I am getting 4.0x ripping-encoding with the settings that I used on the home computer to get 1.0x results. There is something weird going on with the original computer that I wrote about, but I wanted readers to know that Media Center 9 can bring VERY successful, fast results.

[dmt1]

There are advantages and disadvantages to how you are ripping at present, and what is most important to you is what you should base your decision on.

But, using --alt-preset fast standard will not give you QUITE the quality as --alt-preset standard, especially with the LAME encoder that MC9 uses. The reason is that MC9 uses a relatively newer encoder (newer is not necessarily better), and the presets have not been optimized to the newer LAME encoder (I believe MC9 uses LAME build 3.93.) The last LAME encoder where the presets were properly optimized was the 3.90.2 LAME enoder (which is the one I use as an external encoder through MC9.).

My set up that I use is the MC9 ripper in digital secure (Which, IMHO, is the best way to configure the ripper, very similar to EAC)and my EAC/LAME encoder (LAME version 3.90.2) as an external encoder using the --alt-preset standard setting. This gives me a fantastic quality rip/encode every time, at the sacrifice of a little speed, and I still get my audio analyzed by MC9.

The --alt-preset fast standard will give you a fast encode, but I did have some quality issues with it, using the MC9 encoder, plus I was verbally attacked as a traitor by Timmy and Nekura....:D

[Teechur]

I was getting really slow ripping speeds (one CD taking about 40-60 minutes to rip) and then my CD burner died. I replaced it last night and am getting really fast speeds now. Might be a bad CD.