Hi, there, everybody.
I've just tried DVD Lab Pro to create a DVD with music (i want to put all my music onto DVD's).
I tried with only 3 files (very huge files, with 1,5 Gb each) as i mainly have Classical Music (opera, mostly).
It took almost 2 hours just to Compile the project to the hard disk. Yes, you heard well. I said 2 hours !!!
On the contrary, it took only 20 minutes to burn the project from the hard drive to the DVD.
I read the comments to the this tool at VideoHelp (http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=DVD-lab_PRO) and someone wrote "It will author a 2 hour movie with multiple menu transitions normally in less than 15 minutes". How can it be ??? I mean, i only compiled a "music only" DVD with absolutely no "menus" and things too sophisticated and it took me 2 hours only to compile the project to hard drive.
May i have done something wrong ?
Is there a way to burn the compilation without having to burn it previously to the hard drive ?
I really wanted to keep this wonderful tool and make it my default DVD Authoring tool. But i just can't keep it if it takes 2 hours everytime i want to burn a DVD. I have lots of music to put on DVD's. I do mean it. It's about thousands of cd's.
Just in case you don't see a way for me to make DVD Lab Pro take much less time on the process of burning, please tell me if there's another similar software that lets me do it.
I heard about Audio DVD Creator. Is it a reliable tool. This is a very important matter to me. I have absolutely "historical" cd's. Much of them with performances from 1930, 1940 and 1950 (mono). I really liked to preserve its quality. That's why i want a reliable tool.


I would be most grateful to everyone who can help me out with this matter,

J. Silva

I use DVD Lab Pro for DVD authoring and on my system (P4 @3.2GHz) it takes about 15-20 mins to author a regular DVD. I haven't tried authoring a predominantly audio DVD, but I would hazard a guess that your source audio is 44.1kHz? And the extra time maybe down to resampling to 48kHz?

yes, video dvd is 'locked' to 48 kHz sampling rate, so you will loose quality.

J. Silva, it is hard to diagnose your problem when you specify neither your system specs nor the format of the music files.

I dont have experience with the program you talk about, but i am reasonable experienced with "compiling" dvd's. Since you didn't gave many details its hard to pinpoint the exact problem. What i can say is that when you have a fragmented harddisk it will slowdown the proces. The best is to have 2 partitions which are empty (no fragmentation) on 2 different physical drives. Then let the program read and write to the different partitions. Reading and writing to a single fragmented harddisk will take forever when your doing 4gb of data. After you have burned it to dvd empty the partitions and you're ready for the next one.

If you want to know what the bottleneck is on your system it might help to look at the % your cpu is used by the program, and how hard your disk is working during the process.

Thanks johny5 and Never_Again for replying.
My system is: RAM 512 mb; hard drive with two partitions C: and D:, the first with 4,46 Gb free space, the latter with 18,5 gb free space; CPU Intel Pentium IV 2,4 GB; Windows XP Service Pack 2.
The music files are already on the hard drive with the format .m2a (which i believe is a MPEG 2 format). They are upsampled to 48.000 khz with Adobe Audition 1.5 before i put them on DVD Lab Pro.
Johny5 i didn't understanfd what you meant by saying "If you want to know what the bottleneck is on your system it might help to look at the % your cpu is used by the program, and how hard your disk is working during the process." Could you, please, be more specific ? I'm sorry i'm not an expert on these matters.

Thanks,

J. Silva