[ILUG] mp3/ogg players encoders

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Colin Nevin wrote:

> Quick question what are the cd/ogg/mp3 player encoder options on Linux,
> I just fired up grip from the RH7.3 cd and it looks nice but it is soo
> slowww and what's this it doing creating .wav files first then encoding
> into ogg? Is there anything else out there that rips at the same speed
> as Real or WMedia i.e 3.x to 12.x depending on your hardware ?

You might want to make sure DMA is enabled for your hard disk and
particularly your cdrom.  The following article describes this among other
optimizations:

http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html

> btw I'm getting 1.5 to .wav 

I must admit I've never achieved as good speeds ripping as I've heard about
in windows.  1.5 is very poor though.  I get at least 2.5x on relatively
old hardware.  There's definitely no scratches on the cd, right?
cdparanoia is very good at avoiding skips by reading and re-reading the cd
where necessary but naturally this slows things down a lot.

> and 0.7 to .ogg/.mp3 on a Dell PowerEdge
> 1400SC 384MB PIII 1Ghz with the bog standard dell cd-rom.

Something must be wrong here.  I get about to 1.2-1.5x (depending on system
load) on a P2 266MHz using LAME to encode mp3.  That's using the --r3mix
variable bitrate options which are frequently more cpu intensive than
straight 128kbps.  Granted I've heard ogg encoding is not as optimized yet
as mp3 -- it being a newer technology -- but it can't be that much
different.  What encoder are you using?

Check:

1. What's the load on your PC while encoding? ('uptime' will tell you)
2. What's the load on your PC while not encoding?
3. have a look at 'top' and see how much cpu grip & lame/oggenc are using

Gavin