Speed question

Get answers about syncing MediaMonkey 4 with iPods and other devices.

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Agrajag
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Speed question

Post by Agrajag »

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I come to MediaMonkey from dbpoweramp. I was using their Sveta product to control my iPod. My main problem is that it has often managed to mess up the formatting of the iPod requiring a lot of wipes and re-installs.

MediaMonkey I just registered and it looks like a tremendous product. I'm enjoying it quite a bit and find it to be very powerful.

One are of concern is in the speed at which MM syncs with my iPod (an iPod Photo to be exact).

I'm sending it 320k MP3's and its taking forever to send them over. For example, I'm currently sending 262 songs to it (My letter "B" section so I have a LONG way to go yet) and its now been at it for 3 hours and it's up to song 213. I am also including cover art.

Sveta did the same thing in a tiny fraction of the time this is taking for the same quality level. Is there a better, faster way to do this without compromising on the quality? I'm not interested in getting into a discussion about the ability to hear the difference between certain levels. I have to use this to demo tracks to people in the audio industry and we've all pretty much standardized on 320k as the level to support. If I don't use that it's no longer going to be viewed as an apples-to-apples comparison point.
gab
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Post by gab »

are you converting on the fly as you sync? or are you just syncing files at the same bit rate? if it's the latter, it should not take that long. when i convert files on the fly to my ipod (from lossless to mp3), MM proceses about 180 songs/hour. however if i just sync current mp3 to the ipod, mm processes about 2,000 songs/hour.
Agrajag
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Post by Agrajag »

I'm converting on the fly from APE to MP3.

Sveta did this as well and I was able to send 1600+ songs to the iPod in about 2 hours. Of course that's sort of what dbpoweramp is all about. I just didn't expect to drop down in speed this much.

I also have the quality option turned up. I can't find that setting now but it was a choice between fast encoding and low quality and slow encoding and high quality.
jiri
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Post by jiri »

Do you mean that you have selected 'fast encoding and low quality'? This should be the correct choice if you want to make it faster. Except for this, there shouldn't be any significant difference in speed either way.

Jiri
gab
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Post by gab »

Wow - I didn't realize Sveta could convert 800 songs/hour. I use dbpoweramp for ripping because of Accurate Rip and the secure rip functionality but had never used it to sync with the ipod. I'm shocked there is such a difference in speed. I use WMA Lossless instead of APE. I wonder if that has something to do with the speed.

Back to your original question, while you should be able to do better than 60 songs/hour in MM, I've never been able to do better than 180-200 so I don't think you'll be able to match Sveta.
gab
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Post by gab »

jiri - based on your response i just delved deeper into the auto-convert dialog box in mm and realized that within the advanced tab there is a drop-down where you can specify quality/speed trade-off. once you pick a certain bitrate that you're converting to (say MP3 CBR 256), what "quality" is being adjusted in the quality/speed drop-down. Isn't quality a proxy for the bitrate?
Agrajag
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Post by Agrajag »

That's my question too gab. I've chosen the highest quality there so I suspect that's my problem. I'm up to just over 1000 files now on the ipod with just over 600 to go so I might just finish out this way and then do some testing of those settings. I'm curious what the difference in speed is between "High" which says "Recommended" and "Highest".
Agrajag
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Post by Agrajag »

A minor bit of data. I tried encoding the same exact song at both "Highest" and "High (Recommended)" quality settings.

At high it took 33 seconds to encode and copy to the iPod. At highest it took exactly double that at 66 seconds.

That's pretty significant. Double the time does beg the question of the return on the investment. Thus I'd also be curious to know what supposedly happens with that additional time.
gab
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Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2005 1:20 pm

Post by gab »

Agrajag: if you learn anything more on this subject, let me know. if sveta can really transcode on the fly at a rate 4 times as fast as MM, i may give it a look. thanks.
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