Last night, I started converting my entire music library from FLAC to MP3 (for playback on a portable player). My library consists of approximately 3,100 songs and I'm using foobar to convert (with LAME 3.96.1 VBR with a -2 setting).

Obviously, this has to fall under a "for fun" topic ... everyone uses different hardware and system configurations. But I'm curious how long it's taken others to convert a similar amount of music (or more!

I have an Intel P4 2.8 GHz, 512 MB memory and am using two different drives (source -> destination).

At the moment, this is looking like it will run for about 36-48 hours total for the entire collection (with minimal user load on the system). Can anyone beat that? You may sense an underlying question here ... is this about normal for that much music and a conversion between those two formats?

Thanks!

Converting ~7000 files from Monkey's Audio normal (average decoding speed) to WavPack -fx5 (very slow encoding speed) with my Duron 800 took more than a full week of CPU work. Moreover, I had to delete myself and progressively all source files, then replaygain everything. Total time: ~15 days

15 Days!?!?! I am starting to feel a lot better about my 36-48 hour estimate...

After all this, I think I'm going to archive my MP3s as well ... I certainly do not want to go through this again!

When I converted my ~4000 FLAC files to LAME 3.96.1 preset standard, it took almost exactly 24 hours on my AMD64 3200+. I tried vorbis autov b3 on the same system and it took around 14 hours.

EDIT: Giving this a second thought after my post, I think the amount of time is more important than the amount of files. My 4000 tracks amount to about 11 or 12 days if I remember correctly (around 280 hours of music)

I just finished encoding about 10,000 APE files to MP3. It took around 80+ hours.

10,000 APE files?! How much space does that take?

It took 29 hours on my Pentium 4, 3.2 GHz to convert about 4000 Monkey's Audio Insane rips to FLAC --best.

just curious, but what caused you to make that change (ape to flac)? unless you bought a karma or something, it seems like a step down to me... just my opinion...

Well, it was almost impossible to play the Insane files gaplessly because of the huge CPU power needed for decoding. There were gaps between one and three seconds between songs. I was wondering whether or not to switch to Extra High, but decided to change to FLAC because of compatibility. More and more players offer support for FLAC (at least for -2 and -3) and most Linux distros also have FLAC support by default.

Currently coverting 100GB of ape files to mpc. Will probably take around 80 hours.
On top of that I am burning the ape files to dvds before converting and deleting.

I just did a similar conversion recently.
I needed to encode my entire library onto my new iPod. I had a mixture of .wav files , wavpack and Psytel (mpeg2) - encoded AAC's, and I wanted them all converted to M4A files for the iPod

It took around 1.5 days (on a P4 1.8) to convert the .wv files into .M4A files using wvunpack and Nero Encoder. I had to write some interesting scripts to automate the processes. The following script is an example of the sort of stuff I was doing - this one traverses a directory tree and converts wv files to m4a files. Note: only run this on a backup copy of your .wv files as it deletes the originals:


I also wrote scripts to tag entire directory trees using tg.exe etc, and scripts to invoke mp4creator on a set of Psytel-AACs to convert to M4A. I had a lot of fun and the whole procedure took about a week, including some tweaking.

I can recode around 1000-1200 flac files to MP4 (Ipod) format.
With more than 10000 files it will be....
!!!!!!Boring!!!!!!.

Then Nero soon or already have improved codec.. FAST mode.

I have to do it again

Size of flac 250GB.

But I don't have to rip it again, love FLAC.
That was a nightmare.

BR
T