ripping speeds
 

I bought Winamp Pro and I am wondering why I can't get better than 4X- 6X ripping speeds. Sometimes It looks like It's Going get a better speed but drops back to mostly 4X ripping speeds. I've tried setting the my ripping preferences but to no Avail can I get Better speeds

Hi

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....d=161361#specs

What's your CPU & Memory (RAM)?

Are there any other concurrently running processes using a large amount of cpu/ram?

What format are you ripping to?

eg. mp3 at high quality vbr, mp3 at --alt-preset standard, lossless wma, flac, wav?

What speeds do you get when ripping to WAV?

I've got a P3 850 CPU. With 512 MB of Ram. I've shutdown as many of the programs that have been running in the background as I can. I'm Not sure what else to shutdown. I've got Norton Internet security running and I'm thinking that maybe part of the problem because norton is a big resource hog. I'm ripping to MP3 format at 128kb. I don't do wav.. The highest ripping speeds I have got were at 8X. I had musicmatch jukebox and was getting rip speeds upwards of 20X- 25X, before yahoo killed it. Thanks for the help. If there is anything else I can try let me know.

I just wanted you to test ripping to WAV so we could see what kind of speeds you were getting.

Ripping to WAV should be a lot quicker (whereas ripping to mp3 requires the extra process of encoding to a compressed format - and is therefore slower).

I think Musicmatch used some older FhG based mp3 encoder, which may have been faster, but the quality was certainly not the same as Winamp's.

Winamp uses the latest LAME mp3 encoder, and alas, encoding with LAME is slower, but it produces a much better quality output.

I'm not sure if you'll get much faster than 8X speed with an 850 cpu.

You said you're ripping to 128kbps, but is that with the "Normal" Quality setting and "CBR" mode? Or are you using some other settings (eg. High Quality, VBR/ABR, etc)?

I get about 18X speed on a 3200+ CPU for mp3 with the "--alt-preset fast standard" Quality setting, so I guess 6X would be about right for a 1GHz equivalent...

If I remember correctly, I get speeds of up to 40X or something when ripping to WAV...

I changed the encoder in the preferences to MP3 Version 1.35a because after I downloaded winamp It was ripping using one of the MP4 encoders. I'll try ripping a wave and let you know how it turns out. Thanks again