Lossless WMA to MP3 Conversion Seems Slow

[jmatthias]

Hi,

I have ripped all my CDs to lossless WMA. I am now in the process of converting them to MP3.

However, the conversion process seems a little slow. By my estimation it will take 11 days to convert 6000 files. This is longer than it took for me to rip the songs by hand! This seems a little excessive. Does anybody have any tips that would help speed up the process? Here are my hardware specs.

PC: XP2400+, 512MB RAM.
Source drive is external USB 2.0.

Bear in mind that when I ripped the CDs I was using the USB 2.0 drive.

Thanks

Joel

[Spoon]

What is the encoding speed? (such as x15)

[ChristinaS]

Well, it almost makes sense (to me) for such a conversion to be slower than the first time around for a couple of reasons I can think of:

1) you're using the external drive both for input and output whereas the first time you were only using it for output, your input having come from a cd. External drives I believe are a lot slower then internal drives, and the disk cache (if it exists) may not be large enough to compensate. The read/write head will be constantly moving between the area to read from and the area to write to. (OK, I'm really old school, this may not longer apply LOL for all I know).

2) encoding to mp3 may take longer than it took to encode to a lossless format (just a guess, since I think you're trading cpu for space saved)

These considerations will probably only be perceptible for a very large number of conversions.

Do you have an internal hard drive that you can use to hold the converted files from where you can simply move them to the external drive once finished?

Also your priority encoding should be set to below normal for optimal speed.

[jmatthias]

I get 7x-8x speed.

Also I am encoding from the USB drive to the internal drive.

[Razgo]

i havent done a lot of testing in this area so maybe i should since i now have an external USB hardrive also. best i could do was x5 from wma lossless to mp3/128
but that's probably about right for my laptop P3 900 256 ram. it took about 2:50/s for the convert on a 3:39 /s song . and thats on a USB 1.1 not the faster 2.0 USB.

but i think thats about right though. i will see if i can do anything to improve speed

[adaywayne]

I get 7x-8x speed.

Also I am encoding from the USB drive to the internal drive.


If it's any consolation, when I convert a wma lossless file to Lame mp3 at alt. preset ABR of 128Kbps, it converts at 8x speed. That is from and to the same drive on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4. Don't forget the program is first decompressing the
wma file and then compressing the reulting wave file to mp3 (I assume that's what happens).

Now, with the same wma file, it decompresses to wave at 23x and then compresses to mp3 at 13x (on the same computer). A little bit of simple arithmetic.....1/23 + 1/13 = 0.12 (approx) = 8x (approx). Feel better now?