Speed up with coverting in RAM

[MartinP]

Hi,

i made some tests with FLAC-files played via foobar2000 on my Win7/Juli@/DCX2496 system to get the best sound quality. It seems to be fine to have ready converted 96kHz/24bit FLAC-files, which are sent digitaly to the loudspeaker management system.

I tried to convert all my FLAC-files from normal 44,1/16 format to 96/24 format (first 16->24, then 44,1->96) on a dual core system, but it seems to be a "never-ending-story" - it takes very, very long time! To speed up the performance i will build up a new quad core system. Now, here's my question about using dMC:

I Think 4 processes will slow down the over-all-time of conversion when allways using the HD. Is it possible to speed it up by copying files completly into RAM before conversion, to convert them to whatever and then to copy back to HD? Is it possibly realised?

Best regards
Martin

[Spoon]

Re: Speed up with coverting in RAM

The HDD has a finite write speed, even if RAM was used this write speed is still applicable.

[thx1128]

Re: Speed up with coverting in RAM

I suggest making a RAID drive for the conversions... a couple hard drives in a RAID 0 "stripe". I use such a setup and I get 160 MB/s reads and 142 MB/s writes.

In real terms, converting P!nk's "I'm not dead" album from FLAC level 5 to level 8 takes 27 seconds on my quad core (i7 975) system. And yeah the CPU helps but the disk is the limiting factor for my system.