Hi, i am using EAC and lame version 3.96.1. i'm wondering how long it should take roughly for a CD with 10 songs on it. I just started the first song and that seems to be taking about 45 mins for the first song, which seems very slow. I am using the --alt-preset standard. My computer is not the newest but it is not that old and it should not take this long. any ideas if i can make it faster somehow or if i am doing somehting wrong?

Don't know. You even didn't tell what speed your PC has.
Weird question anyhow

For me it takes about 10-20 seconds to encode one track to OGG format (@2.3GHz Pentium 4, RDIM 800Mhz)

Sorry, my computer is pentium 3, 1.47 GHz. I have 256 MB's of RAM.

It definately shouldn't take that long for one song.

You really need to tell us how you have set up EAC with LAME, and what response you are geting.

Are you using LAME.EXE as an external encoder? What switches are you using? Do you see the shell open when LAME begins? If so can you copy and paste the content to this thread? If not go into the EAC options, ensure "Do not open external compressor window" is unchecked, and try again. Did the track ever finish encoding?

I think, if you post all the info from your External Encoder tab (if you are using LAME.EXE) we'll probably have the necessary info to help.

I would suspect the path to LAME or your "additional command line options" are at fault.

a old p2-350 encode at 1-1.2x with lame 3.96.1 preset standard and 2x with mpc 1.14.

The track finished as did the second song. It seems to be working fine just taking a very long time.
Under the compression options and the external compression tab I have selected LAME as the external compresison program to use from a list and i have give the correct path. I have put --alt-preset standard for the additional command line. I the top three boxes at the bottom checked but not the last one.
When i press on MP3 in EAC it starts extratcing from the CD and when each song is finished the black DOS window for lame opens and it starts compressing. When this is finished it closes itself and EAC continues with the next song. EAC itself does not take very long at all for each song.
I have lame.exe and the other lame files in a seperate folder to EAC on my desktop so i dont know if this is a problem. I have not opened lame or made any changes there.

I still don't see how it can take 45 minutes for one track.

I would be very interested to see the LAME output. When a track is 80% complete can you try copying the window content and pasting it here?

To copy from the shell just drag with the left mouse button to highlight, then press the right to copy the highlighted area to the clipboard.

We can't leave you with LAME taking hours to encode one album...

So you are saying that the actual CD digital audio extraction in EAC is not taking that long but when the dos box opens and does the lame compression that it takes about 45 minutes. That's pretty weird, a pentium 166mmx would do it faster than that. You must either have a virus or you computer is so loaded down with junk that everthing is running from virtual memory. TEll me, does your hard disk thrash around a lot every time you switch tasks (programs)?

SORRY

Double Post

My first computer, a Pentium 100 with 32 MB of RAM took 30 minutes to encode one song with old Fraunhofer, back in 1998.

This is not weird. It's impossible.

Maybe another problem (bug? it happens to me with a bad driver) in background using a lot of CPU cycles and therefore lowering encoding speed? Or maybe -q0 with 3.96.1, which is painfully slow.

Driver, maybe.

He said he was using -aps

Isn't there a priority setting in EAC? Maybe Lame is just running as idle priority along with several cpu consuming tasks.

Yes, there is a dropdown, "Extraction and compression priority", on the Extraction tab of the EAC Options (press F9 to access).

The default is "Normal".

This is off topic, but I always use the windows command "start" to give LAME idle priority... it makes the computer actually usable, and doesn't affect encoding time greatly... it seems Windows XP's scheduler is dumb when it comes to command line programs (a good scheduler should lower priority of an application continuosly using its entire time quantum, at least if system latency is any concern).

You're not adding any extra switches... oh, -q0 for instance?

im pretty sure i dont have a virus on my computer. I will try to remove any stuff i dont need and see if i can make it faster. When i get to about 80% i will try copying what it says.

setup EAC like mentioned in the pinned FAQ:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....findpost&p=1595

Try again.