Hello All,
Looking for a suggestion as to why my machine encodes FLAC slow. I have an AMD 3500+ on an Asus A8V-E Deluxe with 1GB Kingston RAM. I use EAC with Flacattack and compress to individual files. The FLAC encoder slows dreadfully, sometimes even pauses. EAC can rip a disc quicker than FLAC can encode it. It doesnt matter which OS I use, problem occurs with both XP and 2K. However, using the same software configuration and drive in another machine I have here, FLAC flies through the compression, EAC has no chance of keeping up. The other machine has a Sempron 3100+ on some cheap board with less RAM. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Dion.

Which Encoder Version are you using? Which compile? What command line settings?

We need a little more info before we can tell you what might be wrong.

You paid too much?
Now seriously, check your IDE configuration, maybe your hard drive dropped out of DMA mode. Uninstall your IDE controllers and restart OS so it sets it up correctly.

H.

Is it thermal throttling?? That could easily cause a slow down!

Kristian

Version 1.1.2.
options: -P 4096 -b 4608 -m -l 8 -q 0 -r 3,3

Current IDE controller transfer mode: Ultra DMA Mode 5

I doubt its thermal throttling, LAME will saturate usage at 100% till the file is done, other encoders do too. If I monitor CPU usage during a FLAC encode, the usage is up and down all over the place. Why would FLAC cause the CPU to get hotter than LAME?

Thanks again,
Dion.

Is your drive fragmented? This can cause possibly that, because FLAC does a fair amount of writing, compared to say, an MP3.

Total fragmentation is 5% on the drive that I write to, apparently I do not need to defragment it.

Even 5% fragmentation can harm performance significantly. Try defragging and see if that fixes it? :/

ALso if that processor is a 64, then you can grab throttlewatch for free from http://www.panopsys.com/Downloads.html . It allows modern P4's and AMD 64's to view whether different throttling techniques are being triggered. TM1's are insetered wait staits, that can slow things down. TM2's are active downlclocking, undervolting etc.

It won't hurt to check. I had a PC that i thought was running fine, but about 25% of the time it had idle states! Perhaps FLAC encoding utilises a different area of the CPU, and generated more heat? I know this was true with Linux and the Reiserfs file sytem.

Of course it could be something completly different

Kristian

I had this problem before the drive could have been fragmented, it was occuring new out of the box. Nothing FLAC performance wise has changed over time, it has always done it, just now its got to the point that I need to fix it, I have a huge batch of CDs to do.

I will grab that download and check.

Thanks,
Dion.

Interestingly, like and intermittent fault, when I'm watching with ThrottelWatch it doesnt fault, encodes perfectly. No slowing or pauses. Admittedly, I tested with one disc only, but twice with ThrottleWatch on, and off. What gives? I'll test further tomorrow.

Dion.

try ripping a .wav, then writing a batch script to continually encode the .wav, in a loop, overwriting the old flac, you can leave flac.exe encoding for hours then, non stop.

I'm not sure how to write the bat file though im afraid

Kristian

Here we go,

:start

flac -P 4096 -b 4608 -m -l 8 -q 0 -r 3,3 test.wav test.flac

del test.flac

goto start


and, no problems, so far.

Dion.

Ok, I've let it encode for hours now, and no throttling logged. Even tried writing to a drive on a different controller, with no improvement. Seems to be a mutitasking issue, but its only with FLAC.

Dion.