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Ripping to FLAC with EAC - Performance Help Required

nsnc

pfm Member
Hello All,

I recently acquired a Synology Diskstation NAS and have configured the two drives in a RAID 1 configuration. I have attached the NAS directly to my PC via ethernet cable and begun to RIP CD's to the FLAC format.

The issue I have is that Performance is simply appauling, taking on average 40 minutes to RIP a single CD. With a library of 500+ CD's to Rip - I dont think I will live long enough to see them all ripped, let alone streaming them.:(

Any help appreciated on how I can speed up the process ?

Thank you - NSNC
 
Hello All,

I recently acquired a Synology Diskstation NAS and have configured the two drives in a RAID 1 configuration. I have attached the NAS directly to my PC via ethernet cable and begun to RIP CD's to the FLAC format.

The issue I have is that Performance is simply appauling, taking on average 40 minutes to RIP a single CD. With a library of 500+ CD's to Rip - I dont think I will live long enough to see them all ripped, let alone streaming them.:(

Any help appreciated on how I can speed up the process ?

Thank you - NSNC
I'd try the obvious: rip to your internal drive so you can tell if it's the NAS or EAC that's the problem. Are you sure that the ethernet cable is actually being used and that you're not using wi-fi without realising?
 
I'd try the obvious: rip to your internal drive so you can tell if it's the NAS or EAC that's the problem. Are you sure that the ethernet cable is actually being used and that you're not using wi-fi without realising?

Hi Nik,

Thanks for the response. I will remove my PC and NAS from a wireless environment and also try ripping direct to internal PC drive for comparison.

NSNC
 
Hi Nik,

Thanks for the response. I will remove my PC and NAS from a wireless environment and also try ripping direct to internal PC drive for comparison.

NSNC
Good. You won't lose anything because you can just copy the FLAC files to the NAS afterwards.

BTW I also have a Synology NAS, the DS210j, the cheapest one that takes 2 drives. This has 2x 1 TB Seagate Barracudas configured as RAID-1. Performance is OK and even over wi-fi, ripping CDs to ALAC (Apple Lossless) direct to the NAS using iTunes takes about 10 mins per CD. The NAS is connected to the router using ethernet but the rest of the network is 11g (54 Mbps) wi-fi, so the route is iTunes on Mac PowerBook > wi-fi > router > ethernet > NAS. If I'm copying a lot of stuff (100s of MBs) I use ethernet cable throughout as the speed is worth it but for "usual" things like ripping 1 or 2 CDs or syncing the ATV, wi-fi is OK.
 
Hi,

This the one to use. It has all the facilities you will ever need. Yes you have to buy it and pay a small contribution to another place to get the art but it is a very small amount.

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

EAC will take forever.

Any issues go over to the Linn forun where there is a wealth of information on ripping.

Cheers

John
 
Another vote for dBpoweramp .. much easier to get to grips with than EAC imo. The free version does the same ripping job as the paid version; paying gives you access to a variety of online tagging resources.
 
Another vote for dbpoweramp. I was struggling with EAC as well before the switch (averaging 5-6 min per disc with medium level error correction). DB is a fair investment for 25 odd quid, has "accurip" and fetches artwork. Average rip with it is about 2 min.

If you want to persist with EAC, you may want to recheck the error correction settings. Sounds like yours is set too high as I had initially had mine.
 
I suspect the problem is that you are moving data back and forth across a slow wireless connection to a slow NAS as the data is first ripped to WAV and then converted to FLAC.

Rip to a local drive and then overnight transfer to the NAS.
 
The closer the data is to the application, the better the performance you will get. Wireless and NAS not most rapid combination. EAC not the fastest ripper by any stretch. DB Power is faster.
 
Rip it to your local harddisk.
Later you will need anyway to make some corrections in folder names etc.

If you have two cd drives (or one cd drive and one cd writer), than you can open eac twice and rip parallely two cds. each on one drive :)
 
I'm sorry but no one has really explained the huge speed discrepancy. People on PFM have recommended EAC yet here we have someone suffering 40 mins per CD. How can this be?
 
EAC or Exact Audio Copy to give it it's full name, looks to make an "Exact" copy so if error correction is set to its highest level it will re-read any bad portions many many times. here's some blurb from EAC's site

"In secure mode this program either reads every audio sector at least twice or rely on extended error information that some drives are able to return with the audio data. That is one reason why the program is slower than other rippers. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the selected error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this effort will help the program to obtain the best result by comparing all of the retries

If it is not sure that the audio stream is correct (at least that it can not be said at approx. 99.5%) the program will tell the user where the (possible) read error occurred. The program also tries to correct the jitter artefacts that occur on the first block of a track, so that each extraction should be exactly the same. On drives which have the “accurate stream” feature, this is guaranteed. Of course, this technology is a little bit more complex, especially with some CD drives which implements caching. When drives cache audio data, every sector read will be read from the drives cache and is that way always identical. Basically there are several ways to clear the cache. In newer versions it will overread sectors, so that the cache contains sectors from a position elsewhere on the CD.

EAC has several secure read modes, depending on the features of the drive. One really fast mode (nearly burst mode speed) is for drives with C2 error pointer support, accurate stream and are non-caching. Another mode (up to half of maximum speed) is for non-caching, accurate stream drives (without C2 support). If caching need to be defeated, the secure mode will be much slower, when no read errors occur it will usually something around a third to a fourth of the drives maximum speed.

This program is really quite slow in secure mode in comparison with other grabbers, but the program checks every sector over and over to get the correct data with high certainty. If you don’t like this feature of EAC and prefer fast copies instead of secure copies, you are able to use the fast or burst extraction option in the drive options menu. But of course in fast mode, the program will no longer be able to find read errors. Only if a read error occurs in a sector synchronization area, a sync error will be displayed. Fast mode is sector synchronized with 2 synchronization blocks of 23 total blocks. Burst copy is even worse, no synchronization is performed at all, enabling extraction at maximum speed of the drive. No error checking of any kind is done. For burst mode there is at least a small indicator of the extracted track quality. If the stream ever breaks, it will tell the user in the status report by showing up suspicous positions. Of course this is only an heuristic; there needn’t be any errors on these positions; moreover there could be errors that are not found at all."

EAC seems to be burst for speed or secure for accuracy your choice Or as above shell out for dBpoweramp.
 
I'm sorry but no one has really explained the huge speed discrepancy.
Nobody can. There is not enough information.

Perhaps the OP has an ancient 2x CD reader?
Perhaps all his discs are covered in jam and EAC is set to very paranoid?
Perhaps his PC is a 386sx running Win95?

etc.

I suggest dbPoweramp, configure it for the drive in question so that AccurateRip works. Set it to 'burst' mode for fastest rips. If AccurateRip tells you the rip is poor then rerip in secure mode. With any reasonable hardware this will get you good rips in a few minutes per disc. You can do the same with EAC but it is harder work.

Paul
 
EAC rips in a couple of minutes.
I ripped all my CDs (700) in 14 days - I work from home.
My routine was to rip several CDs first and then start compression while I do smth else.
For instance, you rip 20+ CDs in about two-thrre hours, and start compression before you go to bed.
Much faster.
 
EAC rips in a couple of minutes.
I ripped all my CDs (700) in 14 days - I work from home.
My routine was to rip several CDs first and then start compression while I do smth else.
For instance, you rip 20+ CDs in about two-thrre hours, and start compression before you go to bed.
Much faster.
So you do it in 2 stages: rip to WAV (?) first, then convert to FLAC (or whatever) later?

Actually, 3 stages, the last being to delete the WAV files. ;)
 
Yes, I rip a lot of WAVs first - 100 to 150 and then I compress the whole lot.
You can set to delete the WAV after it's compressed.
The third and most time-consuming stage is to tag them, find covers etc.
How much time it takes depends on how you'd like to organise your collection. Classic music can be a pain...
 
I'm sorry but no one has really explained the huge speed discrepancy.

Actually I did.

If you rip to a NAS over a wireless link, the ripper will be waiting for the wav to get written to the NAS. Then it fires up FLAC and gets the data back from the NAS, converts it to FLAC, and writes it back to the NAS.

So three trips across the wireless network and three storage operations on a slow NAS drive.
 


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