How Long to Convert SACD ISO Files?

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GOS

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I've always felt like it takes forever for me to convert my newly ripped SACD (iso file) to flac. For example, I just converted a 19 song disc (ended up being 3.02 GB) and it took 35 minutes. I use Foobar by the way.

Does this seem like a long time? If yes, what on earth is slowing it down so much? Anyone else have comments about conversion times?
 
I've always felt like it takes forever for me to convert my newly ripped SACD (iso file) to flac. For example, I just converted a 19 song disc (ended up being 3.02 GB) and it took 35 minutes. I use Foobar by the way.

Does this seem like a long time? If yes, what on earth is slowing it down so much? Anyone else have comments about conversion times?
I use the SONORE ISO and OPPO105, a single stereo SACD takes about 15-20 mins a MCH SACD a little more.
 
I use the SONORE ISO and OPPO105, a single stereo SACD takes about 15-20 mins a MCH SACD a little more.
Remember, I'm talking about the conversion of ISO to flac. Not the ripping part. But, you made me think. I'm getting ready to rip another disc, I'll time it and also time the conversion to flac. Probably I'm just too impatient.
 
Remember, I'm talking about the conversion of ISO to flac. Not the ripping part. But, you made me think. I'm getting ready to rip another disc, I'll time it and also time the conversion to flac. Probably I'm just too impatient.
I see, meaning like taking a DSF file and convert it to a FLAC file? I have never done that.
 
Just ripped another Vocalion disc. There were 40 total songs (20 stereo & 20 MCH). It was 2.23 GB and took 14 minutes via Sonore and my Oppo. Now I'll convert iso to flac....and it took 31 minutes.
 
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Just ripped another Vocalion disc. There were 40 total songs (20 stereo & 10 MCH). It was 2.23 GB and took 14 minutes via Sonore and my Oppo. Now I'll convert iso to flac....and it took 31 minutes.
Those flac files ~24/96 take up a whole lot less room than the ripped dsf files, but then can you here the difference in the music; (a lot less 0s & 1s- makes you wonder that something should be missing?)
Personally I just rip to dsf and keep it there; I believe I hear more of the quietness between the instruments yadda yadda :devilish:
At my age I'm lucky if I can hear a cymbal crash -LOL
 
Hi Gene, I'm right in the middle of doing all this with Miles' Live Evil which I just got yesterday.

Using Foobar, Disc 1 took 15:45 (including 5 stereo and 5 multichannel tracks), with PCM Samplerate set to 176K and DSD2PCM Mode set to Multistage (64p). I think I read somewhere that this mode is the most accurate, but also uses the most processing power. Dunno if output sample rate has any effect on processing time.

Also, the above figure doesn't include Replay Gain calculation time, which took an additional 1:23.

The .iso file is 3.7 GB, the 176K FLAC files add up to 6.3 GB. I could probably get by just fine with 88K sample rate, but since my hardware resamples everything to 96K, I guess my thinking is I'd rather have it downsampling instead of up. Of course I have no solid data to back up this theory. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have the same problem with trying to do this during playback; my otherwise-adequate little cheap netbook struggles with it.

[EDIT] Oops! At first I thought my numbers were comparable to yours, but I was misreading; mine seems to go more quickly. This is on a desktop with a quad-core 3.2 GHz processor, so maybe we're just seeing a difference in processor power here. This particular task is pretty number-crunchy, typically maxing out all available processor time - just the sort of thing that tends to reveal the true top speed (or lack of same) of a lot of laptops/netbooks.
 
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Okay so just fer shits & giggles I copied the same .iso over to the little netbook, set up the same parameters, and the same conversion took almost 47 minutes, and about 2:20 for the ReplayGain thing. So yeah, I'd say processor is the main bottleneck here. Poor netbook actually smelled a bit hot when it was finished - I haven't worked it that hard in its whole little life. :oops:

While I was waiting, I went back to the desktop to weed out my Stupid Videos folder, and actually dozed off with my finger on the ENTER key. Woke up to discover I had started I don't know how many hundred instances of the SAME F890ING CAT VIDEO. The desktop is so jammed up right now, I need to look for a piece of stiff cardboard to cut up the chunks. Sheesh...
 
Foobar does multi threaded conversions. An 8 core processor does 8 files at at same time, but HDD write speed is the major bottleneck with even an 8 core processor.

Notebook hard drives are pretty slow, unless you have a modern one with an SSD drive. Many older notebooks have only 5400rpm drives, where faster spinning drives are 7200rpm.
 
I just did an SACD ISO with 12 tracks 5.1 to FLAC in 2min and 25 seconds:

My all 8 cores of my CPU at 100%. Source and destination drives are NVME SSDs capable of read writing at over 1800MB/sec. A fast conventional HDD may go to 130MB/sec. Over a network to a NAS maybe 100MB/sec or less on a 1GBE LAN, less for most wireless networks.


Here's my Windows Task manager showing all 8 cores at 100%:
FoobarSACDtoFLAC.PNG
 
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Yeah GOS that sounds about right for time if you are using a HDD (disc) Hard drive - but also Homer is right that a SSD would be super faster.

Snood has converted a few ISOs to flac and it not fast of my HDD :rolleyes:
 
My desktop has spinning discs, while the netbook has an SSD - the desktop still finished in about 1/3 the time.

In Windows, if I watch Resource Monitor while Foobar is running this conversion, all cores are absolutely pegged at 100% on both machines, while disk access is somewhat leisurely by comparison. My desktop has 4 cores @ 3.2 GHz, the netbook has 2 cores @ 1.6, for about 4:1 speed-wise. The 2 conversions came out about 3:1, which looks about right if we factor in the SSD vs HD difference.

Seems to me that since the cores are maxed at 100%, then that must be the bottleneck - they wouldn't be able to run flat out like that if they had to wait for the network or the drives.
 
Seems to me that since the cores are maxed at 100%, then that must be the bottleneck

For sure Jim.

On my PC with 8 cores @ 4+GHz the SSDs made a difference, especially since I often do multiple tasks not just convert a single disc to FLAC.

Now that I'm doing quite a few Penteo upmixes I'm copying my original source stereo FLACs to one of my PCs SSDs to process from there, once I've done a few I copy the new UMs back to my surround folder on my NAS for playback, there;s always something hungry for disc resources!
 
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