Rip to RAM

[Gosub]

Hey folks,

After poking around a bit in the forums, the online help and in the apps themselves, I'm curious about the 'rip to RAM' option. I enabled 'rip to RAM' and 'encode at same time' on my Win98SE box w/ 640MB of RAM and it really seems to fly as compared to having those disabled. Here are my questions...

1. Why would I *not* want to use these options? Is there a situation where I shouldn't have these options enabled?

2. Is there anything I need to do with my machine to make sure the 'rip to RAM' option works properly or most efficiently?

3. Can I be doing other things on my machine while ripping to RAM?

4. While ripping, there's a factor indicator showing, for example, "x7", "x9.7", etc. Is this telling me that it's ripping at the indicated multiplier over what it would be if I had those options disabled? Meaning, is it saying it's ripping at seven times (or 9.7 times, etc) the speed than if I had those options disabled?

Thanks! I'm really digging this software!

-Gosub

[MODatic]

1. Why would I *not* want to use these options? Is there a situation where I shouldn't have these options enabled?

If you're using DMC on a computer that doesn't have much ram then it is best to leave "Rip to Ram" off. That's all I know of but that definitely wouldn't apply to your system.

2. Is there anything I need to do with my machine to make sure the 'rip to RAM' option works properly or most efficiently?

Make sure have a good amount of free ram. This is pretty easy since Win 2000 & XP both manage memory well, since you're on a 9x box, (95, 98 & ME) it would definitely be worthwile to download and install a memory managment prog of some sort and use it to free up some ram before you begin a rip.

3. Can I be doing other things on my machine while ripping to RAM?

Yes, just not playing games since they require lots of memory and CPU power. You'll also have to put up with a sluggish computer since after it rips the CD to ram, it has to encode it and that requires ~95% CPU power.

4. While ripping, there's a factor indicator showing, for example, "x7", "x9.7", etc. Is this telling me that it's ripping at the indicated multiplier over what it would be if I had those options disabled? Meaning, is it saying it's ripping at seven times (or 9.7 times, etc) the speed than if I had those options disabled?

The indicator shows the exact speed that the audio is getting extracted from the CD to the ram. For example 10x would mean that the audio is getting extracted at 10x real-time by the CD drive to the ram. 10x would mean a 10 minute song would take 1 minute to be extracted.

[Spoon]

Yes the ripping speed is times faster than realtime playing an audio CD, if I remember correctly my first CD drive was a dual (trusty panasonic,matsushita) speed (or x2) and it would only manage 2x176KB per second.