How to maximize ripping speed

Hi -

I'm looking for some help on maximizing mp3 ripping speed.

Having got myself happily kitted up with a Squeezebox for playing mp3s over a 802.11b wireless network, and a new 250GB external drive hooked up to a new Firewire card, I'm ready to rip a large number of my favorite tracks for non-discerning listening and for my SO to sync with her iPod. Currently I'm happy to rip at 192 kbps CBR mp3, quality-wise. iTunes achieves 2.7x realtime whereas my bought copy of Roxio reaches about 7x. Is there any hardware or software bottleneck or something I could buy to make this faster? I have about 1000 CDs, and, while I don't want to rip everything, even my favorites only will take a long time.

My PC is an old pentium 450 MHz, 256MB memory, now XP home, old sound Soundblaster card, old CD drive, marked 4 4 4 24 IIRC. Other than to say: get a decent PC, is there anything specific you can spot here which could make things significantly better if changed/upgraded? If you need more specifics on the PC, I can get them when I'm at home. TIA.

 

Steve that is an unusally low speed for itunes, mine goes at about 12-15.

Check in the prefs on burning that its not set to a lower speed, I would suggest to have it on automatic.

Also remember that you can simply drag tunes into the library, so as the squeeze can work with itunes, you might want to rip in your favorite app then drag them into itunes.

 

Doesn't it depend on the speed of the drive reading the CD and the interface to the CD, I'd buy a really cheap CD-ROM drive that is 52x speed.

It could be that your motherboard has just IDE rather than EIDE

Enhanced IDE, a newer version of the IDE mass storage device interface standard developed by Western Digital Corporation. It supports data rates of between 4 and 16.6 MBps, about three to four times faster than the old IDE standard. In addition, it can support mass storage devices of up to 8.4 gigabytes, whereas the old standard was limited to 528 MB. Because of its lower cost, enhanced EIDE has replaced SCSI in many areas.

EIDE is sometimes referred to as Fast ATA or Fast IDE, which is essentially the same standard, developed and promoted by Seagate Technologies. It is also sometimes called ATA-2.

There are four EIDE modes defined. The most common is Mode 4, which supports transfer rates of 16.6 MBps. There is also a new mode, called ATA-3 or Ultra ATA, that supports transfer rates of 33 MBps

FYI 16X DVD read is aprox 48X CD read

 

You could try downloading Sisoft Sandra Standard and check out your hardware :-

http://www.sisoftware.net/

There is a CD-ROM/DVD Benchmark module.

 

Thanks for the replies. I'm quite happy to use another program for ripping (if that is the bottleneck) and drag into iTunes. I've already been using Roxio with a limited speed improvement.

If I were to buy a faster drive, would something like this 52x CD do http://www.komplett.no/k/ki.asp?sku=123309&cks=PRL ? or do I first need to establish whether I have EIDE? IIRC the PC is from about 1999 with an Asus P2B board and a P3 processor.

I have a copy of Sisoft Sandra already installed so I will check it this evening I'd forgotten about the CD test module so I'll have a go with that too.

 

I'd see what sandra says about your hardware first.

 

Sandra is the biggest load of pants for performance checking. Just make sure you have a quick CD drive - you would need a seriously old system to not have EIDE support.

Get more memory and a quicker CPU too.

Hell you may as well buy a new motherboard and make it a brand new computer!

 

get a piece of software called cdex its on sourceforge then do a quick google for the latest pre compiled LAME encoder this should be a dll you put in the cdex folder that sould give you you best chance of ripping fast.

with my system i can rip a 3 or 4 min track in like 10 seconds but then I do have an AMD64 3200+ so i'm bound to get better then a pentium 450.

as for your cd drive getting a faster one wont effect your speeds at all 24x is already fast enough for what the rest of your system can do.