Hi there,
I'm about do a bunch of ripping/encoding next weekend, and I have access to alot of hardware. I've been building out some 1U P4 ~2.8Ghz single proc machines to handle the encoding, but I can also get a couple of 8-way Xeon 550mhz machines. My question is... how/does LAME support SMP? If I run one encoding process, will it use all the CPU's, or if I run 8 encoding processes, can I somehow assign each process to a different CPU?

I ask these questions in advance, because as you can imagine these 8-way machines are huge and weigh probably 150lbs, and I don't want to mess with them if they aren't going to perform...

Thanks in advance, and given that this is my first post, I'd like to say thanks to everyone for all the incredibly useful information I've gleaned from these forums over the last month preparing for this project...

Regards,

Scott

No it does not. There is a SMP build of LAME out there, but it disables the bit-reservoir and will degrade you sound quality considerably at the same bit-rate as a single-threaded LAME builds. I think the best you can do is to encode several files in parallel.

/Kef

Your OS is in charge of delegating processes to specific processors. If you start 8 instances, i would bet they'd each run on a different CPU. You don't have to do anything special. LAME is single-threaded, though, so a single process won't get any benefit from the other 7 CPUs.