What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

[siriussurfer]

Hi,

I experienced that dual ripping to flac and mp3 is much slower than single ripping to flac. I wonder, whether it could take less time first doing the single rip to flac and afterwards converting all the files to mp3.

Of course, that this works there should be provided that the converter takes all the folder structure, filenames and tags from the flac files. The only difference is: the flac files are in \flac\*\* and the mp3 files are to copy to \mp3\*\*

Anybody checked this out? Is that faster? We talk about ripping a couple of hundreds CDs.

Greetx
Dietrich

[Spoon]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

It will be slower single rip and convert.

[Kiwi]

workflow options

Without contradicting Spoon (Da Man), I would say that the answer to the question you raise is dependent on the quality of your CDs you are ripping and encoding. If your CDs are in great shape and are ripping at high speed and being AccurateRip verified in one pass, then using the dual encoder is the optimal workflow. However, if you have to do multiple passes, with CD treatment in between, to get an error free rip then I found it better to work on getting an error free FLAC encoded album first. Once you have all your CDs ripped with a FLAC encoding, you can do a batch conversion that will chug away unattended and the batch conversion process makes full use of multi-core CPUs.

[siriussurfer]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

It seems like dual ripping doesn't use dual core processing on my machine. Single flac ripping does. Hmm...

[Kiwi]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

It is difficult to discern if multiple CPUs are being used with multi-encoder so I monitored CPU usage and it appeared as though the FLAC and MP3 encoding start simultaneously but MP3 takes far longer than FLAC and the CPU that was doing the FLAC encoding isn't released to start ripping the next track.

When you are using a single encoder, you can clearly see multiple CPUS in use as the program can be ripping and encoding at the same time.

[bhoar]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

It is difficult to discern if multiple CPUs are being used with multi-encoder so I monitored CPU usage and it appeared as though the FLAC and MP3 encoding start simultaneously but MP3 takes far longer than FLAC and the CPU that was doing the FLAC encoding isn't released to start ripping the next track.

When you are using a single encoder, you can clearly see multiple CPUS in use as the program can be ripping and encoding at the same time.

I'll be the devil's advocate here:

My suggestion is to use a "rip to FLAC only" strategy while ripping. When the job is done, do a full conversion from FLAC to MP3 as a separate process using the batch converter.

Why? Because the transcode can run overnight without you having to interact with the machine at all. With this method, the remove-CD+insert-CD latency will be much lower, meaning the interactive part of the rip will take less time. For non-assisted ripping, the interactive part is a lot of *my* time. I care less about the total computer time used.

-brendan

[siriussurfer]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

brendan,

this is a very welcome proposal. I really think about it doing it that way. My only worry is that some of the tags (e.g. replay gain or rating) could get lost. I also have to find out, how to batch convert from flac to mp3 creating all the directories and filenames from \\Flac\artist\album\title.flac to \\MP3\artist\album\title.mp3

thx
dietrich

[kork]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

brendan,

this is a very welcome proposal. I really think about it doing it that way. My only worry is that some of the tags (e.g. replay gain or rating) could get lost. I also have to find out, how to batch convert from flac to mp3 creating all the directories and filenames from \\Flac\artist\album\title.flac to \\MP3\artist\album\title.mp3

thx
dietrich

If you (or anyone else) have found that out, I'd be happy to know.
Does the batch-converter have any commandline options?

Thanks,

Rob.

[Spoon]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

No (batch converter commandline options).

[LtData]

Re: What is faster: dual rip or single rip and convert?

ReplayGain tags aren't carried over in conversions by design. Add the ReplayGain DSP effect to your conversion to keep them. Not sure about rating, but otherwise, all tags should be kept as long as they are supported in your destination format (normally all).