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[Craig]

I've been seeing really slow performance when ripping cd's lately. I thought it was my drive so tried it in another pc and it was the same so I've had a play with with some settings and the problem seems to be with the flac encoder.

I always use secure rip but when I uncheck 'encode concurrently' then I can see the rip happens quickly but a 4 min song is taking 3 mins to encode.

Any ideas?
Craig

[JimH]

It could be how the encoder is set.  You could try the default settings (if you haven't).

[Craig]

I've got quality set to 5, add 4k padding and add seek table are checked, the other 2 aren't.

I'm not sure what the defaults are.

Craig

[JimH]

Try it without any options.  The more you compress, the slower it will be, and the compression increase is only a few percent in size.

[Craig]

I've tried it with no options and quality set to 0 and it's still the same so I set the ripping encoder to Ogg and concurrent and I'm getting secure rips at around 8x, change back to flac and it's 0.7x

Wierd.

Craig

[JimH]

Here are the default settings I have for FLAC (attached picture).

[Craig]

That's how I had it set.
In plugin manager I seem to have two flac plugins,  v1.0.1 of j river flac under Encoders and v2.4.3 of Scotts flac plugin under input plugins. Does that seem right?

Craig

[JimH]

I'm not 100% certain.  JRiver's FLAC plug-ins should now be sufficient.  You could try removing the others.

[Craig]

I tried that and I also deleted my install directory and reinstalled MC15 to make sure there was nothing left over from previous versions and neither helped. The new install does include v 2.4.3 of in_flac.dll by Scott T though.

Craig

[JimH]

Deleting an install directory doesn't uninstall, as you probably know.  Use uninstall, reinstall.  In this situation, I would consider removing registry entries when you uninstall, but you will lose your settings.

[Alex B]

The v. 2.4.3 by S.T. seems to be correct (Plug-in Manager > Input > FLAC Plugin > About...). In any case, it is the input plug-in, not the encoder.

I don't have the speed problem (I just did a test rip).

Craig,

Have you tried to rip to Wave and then encode to FLAC separately? Is the file converter similarly slow?

[Craig]

Deleting an install directory doesn't uninstall, as you probably know.  Use uninstall, reinstall.  In this situation, I would consider removing registry entries when you uninstall, but you will lose your settings.

I'll try that when I get a bit of time Jim,

The v. 2.4.3 by S.T. seems to be correct (Plug-in Manager > Input > FLAC Plugin > About...). In any case, it is the input plug-in, not the encoder.

I don't have the speed problem (I just did a test rip).

Craig,

Have you tried to rip to Wave and then encode to FLAC separately? Is the file converter similarly slow?

I've just tried converting a flac to a wav and it was done in seconds, converting the wav back to flac took 3 mins.

So it seems clear that it's a flac problem, nothing to do with ripping.

Craig

[Alex B]

FLAC is a so called asynchronous format. Decoding FLAC is usually faster than encoding it.

However, your speed difference is probably a lot bigger than it should.

[Craig]

I can see your point Alex but this is 5 seconds flac to wav and and 3 1/2 mins wav to flac. Also I'm seeing exactly the same on all 3 of my pcs. On my main pc I've always kept older versions of MC and MC12 works fine, MC13, 14 and 15 don't.

All 3 pcs are on XP so maybe it's an XP 'upgrade' thats caused this.

Craig

[Craig]

And the culprit is -----> Microsoft Security Essentials!!!

Even though I had Flac, Wav and others in the excluded file types it must have still been scanning them, adding MC15 to the 'Excluded Processes' list has cured the problem!!
Maybe MC is creating a temp file somewhere during the conversion that is not excluded?

Now I need to go buy some cd's and get ripping again :-)

Thanks everybody,

Craig

[Alex B]

I'm glad you found the cause of the problem. I was about to ask about possible external factors like overactive security programs, slow wireless LAN, etc.

[Craig]

Alex,

Security programs are usually the first thing Jim suggests too. I'm still baffled by what's going on though.

Now I know what's happening, I can see the process MsMpEng.exe using 50% processor time during the conversion but only in the wav -> flac direction. During the conversion I can see that MC creates a temp file but it is a .flac so should be excluded.

Oh well, the postman just brought me a new Chuck Prophet CD to rip - karma eh? :-)

Craig

[tunetyme]

Craig:

I am seeing a similar problem.  How did you solve it?  What do I need to do?

Tunetyme

[Craig]

Tunetyme,

In Microsoft Security Essentials, go to settings - Excluded Processes and then add Media Center 15 to the list.

Craig

[tunetyme]

Thanks. 

The anti-virus programs chew up so many resources and they are a pain.  I just disabled it to download the latest update.  It was faster.  Now I will have to dig into the Avast program and make the adjustments for several of my software programs.

Tunetyme

[Gl3nn]

I'm running a fresh install of Windows7-32bit, MSE (I have not made an exception for MC15) and the latest MC 15.  Ripping to Flac is perfectly fine, as speedy as any other option, using the J River encoder.  I don't have any idea what this "Scott's" plugin is, but that in combination with MSE might be the issue.  MSE itself is certainly not causing problems for me.  Ditto with conversions from ape to flac.

[Craig]

Crescent,

Scotts' plugin refers to a plugin by Scott Thomson that was used to provide flac support in MC before it was incorporated into the MC encoders as strandard.

I'm still using XP so that might be the difference between our setups.

Craig