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GUI Junkie
Asked: 2012-01-27 14:10:38 +0800 CST

Can Sound Juicer become faster or should I use another program?

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I'm shocked at how slow Sound Juicer rips audio CD's. My machine is an Intel i7 with 4Gb RAM, so I thought that ripping would take just a couple of minutes. But the program takes it's time and lasts about 20' for each CD.

Is there a way to configure Sound Juicer to make better use of the available hardware?

Is there another program available for faster ripping?

The DVD is a Super Multi DL Drive. I guess it's faster than single speed. No serious errors on the command line after the extraction starts. Before that, gtk errors and glib errors. Running it from the command line is much faster.

Warnings on command line:

(sound-juicer:1285): WARNING **: Widget (GtkEntry) has more than one label 
(sound-juicer:1285): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid cast from GdkX11Window' to GtkWidget' 
(sound-juicer:1285): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_display: assertion GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed 
(sound-juicer:1285): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_cursor_new_for_display: assertion GDK_IS_DISPLAY (display)' failed 
(sound-juicer:1285): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_cursor_unref: assertion `cursor != NULL' failed

I've monitored the system, and the memory use stays below 800Mb, also, the processors stay mostly below 20%.

Now, if a CD has 700Mb max, wouldn't it be possible to read the smallest song (in bytes) into memory, start processing that with one thread, read the next smallest song into memory and spawn the next process, etc?

With 4Gb RAM, and 8 processors, the computer should not have any problem ripping and encoding 4 CD's in memory at the same time. Or should it?

dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.0258942 s, 0.0 kB/s

real    0m12.087s
user    0m0.000s
sys 0m0.004s
sound-juicer

3 Answers

  1. The reason extraction is so slow is because sound juicer uses cdparanoia, which was designed to read the disc multiple times in a very low level mode and perform complex software error correction to work around bugs that many drives commonly had, and any physical scratches on the disc. I think these days most drives manage to do it correctly themselves, and so cdparanoia is no longer really needed. There appears to be an open bug to have sound juicer stop using cdparanoia here:

    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313302

    It appears that sound-juicer has a gconf setting named paranoia where you can configure the paranoia settings. Open gconf-editor and change the value to 0 and things go MUCH faster.

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  2. I'd say no, your ripping speed is based on your hardware for the most part. The only thing your software is doing is reading, arranging, and checking the data that the cd/dvd drive is scanning.

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  3. DVD write speed is a function of the drive and of the actual media. The media write speed for that particular media will be on the packaging, you can't do better than that. The achieved write speed is usually reported by the writing software so you can see if the advertised speed is achieved. Your drive is likely SATA which is capable of speeds faster than your drive can handle.

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