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waffffffle · Oct 21, 2003, 12:12 AM

I just bought a G4 400 off ebay to function as a jukebox and I have to rip the several hundred CDs that we have which used to be in our CD jukebox before it broke. Right now iTunes is ripping at about 4.7x. Can I replace the CD drive with a fast CD ROM to speed it up? Can I put any CD drive that I want in there? Does anyone know how fast the drive that I currently have is (its a plain CD-ROM drive).

Thanks.

DrBoar · Oct 21, 2003, 02:11 AM

www.xlr8yourmac.com has huge lists of CDdrives compatible with the mac

the original CD had a 32 x accordning to
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=43103

SSharon · Oct 21, 2003, 02:55 AM

I recently put a lite-on 52/32/52 drive into my MDD and although it burns very fast itunes still doesn't rip cd's very quickly (no where near the 52x it can do). still a great purchase just wanted to give you a heads up.

Severed Hand of Skywalker · Oct 21, 2003, 03:32 AM

I don't think the CD is the problem. Try ripping some AIF's of your hard drive and I bet they will still be slow. 400MHz ain't much.

D'Espice · Oct 21, 2003, 07:17 AM

Exactly, if you really want to speed it up you'd need a new CPU. I used to get ~6x on my G4/450 with a CD-ROM that was capable of ripping Audio at ~21x

:XI: · Oct 21, 2003, 09:28 AM

Originally posted by SSharon:
I recently put a lite-on 52/32/52 drive into my MDD and although it burns very fast itunes still doesn't rip cd's very quickly (no where near the 52x it can do). still a great purchase just wanted to give you a heads up.

the 52x is how fast the drive can read data and has no influence on how fast iTunes will encode an mp3. When iTunes states that it is encoding as x4.5 that four and half times faster than realtime. If you encoded a 2.5 minute track at x1 it would take 2.5 minutes, at x2 it would take 1.25 minutes, at x4 it would take 42.5 seconds.

The best way to improve this is with a faster cpu as stated above.

redJag · Oct 21, 2003, 09:57 AM

Or you could get a big harddrive and just rip AIFF. Much less CPU intensive.

GoGoReggieXPowars · Oct 21, 2003, 11:55 AM

Originally posted by SSharon:
I recently put a lite-on 52/32/52 drive into my MDD and although it burns very fast itunes still doesn't rip cd's very quickly (no where near the 52x it can do).

52x is the theoretical max, I doubt you'll ever see that in real life usage, expecially not ripping CDs, even straight to AIFF.

SSharon · Oct 21, 2003, 12:27 PM

I know 52 is just a max its just odd that I can burn 700mb in under 2 mintes and it takes longer than that to rip a cd. I have the dual 1ghz MDD (768mb ram) so I don't think cpu power is the problem with itunes. Also can itunes rip 2 cd's at once? I have a cpu meter in my menu bar and rarely see the cpu's get maxed out.

redjag- I have a second hard drive (120gb) so are you saying that I should just drag and drop the cd over there to copy the entire thing as aiff and then convert those to mp3? seems like that would take a while too.

thanks for all the advice

superlarry · Oct 21, 2003, 02:23 PM

Originally posted by SSharon:
I know 52 is just a max its just odd that I can burn 700mb in under 2 mintes and it takes longer than that to rip a cd. I have the dual 1ghz MDD (768mb ram) so I don't think cpu power is the problem with itunes. Also can itunes rip 2 cd's at once? I have a cpu meter in my menu bar and rarely see the cpu's get maxed out.

redjag- I have a second hard drive (120gb) so are you saying that I should just drag and drop the cd over there to copy the entire thing as aiff and then convert those to mp3? seems like that would take a while too.

thanks for all the advice

when you burn a cd, it's just raw data.. the cpu is hardly used at all. ripping a cd, even reading an audio cd as you play it, requires decoding that is done by the drive. some cd-rom drives that are, say, 24x theoretical max can only decode audio at 6x. that and the cpu limitation make for the slow mp3-encoding people experience.
if your cpu's aren't maxed out, what you're experiencing is the drive decoding bottleneck.
to rip to aiff, you set the importing preferences in itunes to import to aiff instead of mp3.

bri-guy · Oct 21, 2003, 05:29 PM

I used to have a G4 400 and with a 40x CDRW drive the max ripping speed I saw was approx 6-7x. At 4.7x, you are very close to the maximum speed the processor can rip at.

If you are intent on replacing the drive, it is relatively easy to do. Just go easy on the plastic clips for the front panel of the computer.

waffffffle · Oct 21, 2003, 05:38 PM

Hmm, I had figured this thing could rip faster. Oh well. My new method is to install iTunes on all of our lab PCs. Some of those PCs can rip at close to 10x.

dfiler · Oct 21, 2003, 05:49 PM

when you burn a cd, it's just raw data.. the cpu is hardly used at all. ripping a cd, even reading an audio cd as you play it, requires decoding that is done by the drive. some cd-rom drives that are, say, 24x theoretical max can only decode audio at 6x. that and the cpu limitation make for the slow mp3-encoding people experience.

There is no difference in speed when reading music data files as compared to other files. It does not matter whether the cd is redbook audio or not. This guy was probably thinking of the analog output. Cheap, internal digital-to-analog converters don't have the processing power to play music at much more than 4x if even that. These are completely bypassed while ripping.

Unfortunately, a faster drive isn't likely to speed up the ripping. My dual 450 gets around 10x when ripping to 200kbps VBR mp3s. The 400mhz cpu is definitely your bottleneck.

SSharon · Oct 21, 2003, 08:40 PM

I just ripped one of my cd's and watched the speeds for each song and the cpu monitor and saw that the max speed was 14.7x (using 60% x2 cpu) and it averaged (not scientific just guessing) about 12.5x (using 50% x2 cpu). Looking at some of these other ripping speeds that doesn't seem so bad anymore. I wonder why I thought it could go faster? Or why they make anything above 24x drives?

superlarry · Oct 21, 2003, 08:51 PM

Originally posted by dfiler:
Cheap, internal digital-to-analog converters don't have the processing power to play music at much more than 4x if even that. These are completely bypassed while ripping.

oh thanks, i didn't know that! :c)

D'Espice · Oct 22, 2003, 02:54 AM

Originally posted by dfiler:
There is no difference in speed when reading music data files as compared to other files. It does not matter whether the cd is redbook audio or not. This guy was probably thinking of the analog output. Cheap, internal digital-to-analog converters don't have the processing power to play music at much more than 4x if even that. These are completely bypassed while ripping.

Now that is just wrong. There's a huge difference whether the drive is reading a Data CD or an Audio CD. Nowadays CD-ROMs can read Data CDs at 40x-52x which however is not a constant speed. However Audio-CDs are usually read at 6x-24x. The fastest drive actually is a Plextor (don't know the model though) that can read Audio-CDs at 32x (theoretically) but still performs quite nice, at ~27x.

If you want to know how fast _YOUR_ drive is, there are two ways: You can either check out the technical specifications for your CD-ROM, however we all know that companies like to *cough* not tell the entire truth *cough* about their hardware so what you'll get by reading the specs is what the company would like the drive to be.
The other way is simply to bypass the CPU when ripping: Select AIFF or WAV (if possible) and rip on - the speed you'll get there is pretty much the max. your CD-ROM can do when reading Audio-CDs.

dfiler · Oct 22, 2003, 06:21 PM

Originally posted by D'Espice:
Nowadays CD-ROMs can read Data CDs at 40x-52x which however is not a constant speed. However Audio-CDs are usually read at 6x-24x.

I stand corrected. (what the hell was i thinking?)

Yes, audio CDs are in a different format (redbook audio) and cannot be read as quickly.

tooki · Oct 22, 2003, 09:40 PM

Audio CDs can't normally be read as fast as data CDs, but it's not necessarily as dire as it used to be -- most CD-RW drives nowadays can rip audio at nearly the speed they read data CDs (my 2 year old 40x12x48 CD-RW rips audio at up to 40x).

Now, as for writing CDs, whether it takes CPU power is completely dependent on the source format of the audio files. If you're burning from AIFF (or another uncompressed format) there is nearly no CPU load. If you're burning from MP3, there is the very significant CPU load of decoding the MP3 to raw audio. For example, my blue G3/350 can only burn from MP3 at 8x, since it can't decode MP3s anywhere close to the 40x maximum burn speed of the drive.

tooki

redJag · Oct 22, 2003, 11:03 PM

Set iTunes to import as AIFF. Should notice quite an increase, assuming your CD-ROM can read faster than you can rip MP3s. Of course, then you'll either waste a bunch of disk space or have to wait while you encode them into MP3s, anyway.