Exessive memory usage with ripper (R13)

[maggior]

Hi -

I'm a user of EAC and have been using it for what seems forever (8 years?). I keep reading about how dbpoweramp's ripper is now just as good and superior in ways. I've used the encoder for quite a while and have always found it to be great!

I gave the ripper a spin last night and I was quite impressed. I like the artowrk download, the tagging flexability, and the speed. I was VERY happy - I thought I had now met my new CD ripper!

That was until I started ripping some Klaus Schulze CDs from the Contemporary Works 1 collection. Toward the end of the disc, the machine would completely bog down. Once I managed to get task manger up, I found that cdgrab (something like that) was using more than 500MB or memory? And it was continuing to climb! It hit the 95% of memory used point. I think the reason I saw the issue only with these discs is because of their length (between 70 and 80 min.).

From reading on the forum here, I see it rips to memory and encodes from there. This is great, but it seems excessive to expect a machine to have more than 1GB of RAM for CD ripping.

The machine I was using is a dual core laptop with 1GB or RAM running Windows Vista Home Basic. I was ripping to FLAC.

Does the ripper really want more than 1GB of RAM to work properly? Is there a way to make the ripper work without using up this much memory? Would ripping to WAVE and encoding to FLAC later avoid the issue?

Thanks for your help!
Rich

[bhoar]

Re: Exessive memory usage with ripper (R13)

1. If you are ripping to tracks, what's the longest track length on the disc?

2. If you are using "Rip As 1" instead of tracks, what is the length of the disc?

3. Do you have AccurateRip enabled and configured and, if so, are you getting AccurateRip matches?

4. Do you have C2 enabled?

5. Are you set for burst or secure ripping?

6. If secure, what options do you have set (ultra secure enabled, min/max/clean passes, maximum bad frame re-reads, secure rip abort settings).

-brendan

PS - for what it is worth, Vista is a bit of a dog on 1GB machines to begin with, substantially moreso than XP.

[maggior]

Re: Exessive memory usage with ripper (R13)

1. If you are ripping to tracks, what's the longest track length on the disc?

In once case, the entire disc is a single track (75 min.). In other cases, there are tracks in the 20 - 35 min. range.

2. If you are using "Rip As 1" instead of tracks, what is the length of the disc?
Not using "Rip as 1". (I assume this means rip the entire disc as a single track).

3. Do you have AccurateRip enabled and configured and, if so, are you getting AccurateRip matches?
These discs are not in the AccurateRip database. Yes, it is enabled and worked with other discs. It is configured - that popped up with one of the first discs I put in.

4. Do you have C2 enabled?
Yes. It is a Plextor Premium drive, so it has C2 support.

5. Are you set for burst or secure ripping?
I'm doing secure ripping.

6. If secure, what options do you have set (ultra secure enabled, min/max/clean passes, maximum bad frame re-reads, secure rip abort settings).
ultra secure is not enabled. The FUA option it turned on to flush the cache. C2 is enabled. Other than that, it is default settings.


-brendan

PS - for what it is worth, Vista is a bit of a dog on 1GB machines to begin with, substantially moreso than XP.

Yeah, I know. I expected that to be brought up. But, I haven't had any other problems like this with other apps. I'm able to use EAC with no trouble on this machine.

Thanks Brendan for your help!

PSS - Sorry, I now see I created this thread under the wrong topic. Rookie error :-).

[bhoar]

Re: Exessive memory usage with ripper (R13)

Yeah, I know. I expected that to be brought up. But, I haven't had any other problems like this with other apps. I'm able to use EAC with no trouble on this machine.

Thanks Brendan for your help!

PSS - Sorry, I now see I created this thread under the wrong topic. Rookie error :-).

Right, ok - that's expected with a single track, full CD. You simply need more memory for those with dbpoweramp's ripper.

With your configuration in secure mode (perhaps all configurations), dbpoweramp has to keep the entire track in memory so that it can attempt to verify the accuraterip ID before deciding whether additional passes or bad-frame(C2 flagged) rerips should occur. Only after they occur (if needed), does it start piping the ripped PCM data to an encoder. During that entire process, the entire track, plus potentially more reads, exist in memory only.

EAC probably didn't have a problem in secure mode because it does re-reads during the first "pass" and doesn't depend on the accuraterip match to make decisions about re-reading. So it probably starts piping data to the encoder as soon as it is satisfied with a frame-cluster's C2 and rereads before moving onto the next part of that track, and can discard data that has been successfully piped to the encoder.

dbpoweramp can be faster and can be "more secure" than EAC under some circumstances, but you found the big tradeoff, which is that it requires higher memory use per ripping thread to do so, and single-track CDs are the worst-case scenario for this tradeoff.

-brendan

[maggior]

Re: Exessive memory usage with ripper (R13)

Hi Brendan -

Thank you so much for the detailed response. Yeah, there is always a trade off between memory footprint and performance.

At least now I understand the technical issues involved and where it is that I will run into a problem like this. I'll have to think about it - this may be the thing that pushes me over the edge to upgrade to 2 GB of RAM on my laptop.

Thanks again!
Rich