:-( iTunes performance on Intel Duo

solrac

solrac

Mac Ninja
Wow this is sad, or maybe something is just wrong.

But on my old G4 powerbook, my iTunes would encode mp3s at 7x or 8x. On my Pentium 4 2 Ghz something like 2 year old PC tower, I see performance of 80 - 100x in MP3 encoding. Literally!!!

Now I got a new MacBook Pro 15", 2ghz intel core duo w/ 1.5 GB RAM. I was hoping for good performance. But I'm getting the same old crappy 7x or 8x, same as the Powerbook G4.

What's the deal? Please tell me iTunes is running in Rosetta or something

-Carlos-
 
iTunes does not run under Rosetta as far as I am aware. There were reports early on after the Macbook Pros release that it was not as quick at some things as Apple were reporting and one of the applications mentioned was iTunes.

80 to 100X is that from audio files already on the hard drive ? CD riping speed is mostly governed by the read speed of the drive it is coming from and I have never seen an 80 to 10X drive.

Another factor on CDs is how they are written originally most of the ones I have connverted on tMy G5 come across at between 10 and 20X, but some especially spoken word can be as slow as 2X. I would say 8X is about normal for reliable conversion.
 
My bad... i'm a dunce.

I put the AIFF file on my external Firewire Hard Drive (7200 RPM) and then encoded it to MP3. I got 30x.

Not as good as the P4 at 80x but at least it's a major improvement.

Maybe the P4 has a faster connection to its own internal HD than my external firewire drive can get through the cable...
 
If you're using SATA on the PC, then it's for sure going to be faster than the 400 Mbps you get from Firewire or the 800 Mbps if you're using Firewire-800. The slowest SATA transfers at 1.5 Gbps. ;)
 
But you're still limited to the actual HD read speed even though the interface can move that much data. Typically you only get 50MB/second maximum no matter the interface unless you have a RAID array in which case you can get up to 1GB/second and faster.
 
I wonder what the difference is between the 5200 RPM internal MacBook Pro drive and a typical SATA internal PC HDD.

Also, I wonder if I can get a Firewire 800 card for my MacBook? Because my drive is a FW800 drive, and my only downgrade from PowerBook 17 inch to MacBook Pro 15 inch (other than the screen size lol) is loss of the FW800 port.

I wonder, in that case, what the difference is between a FW800 drive and a typical SATA internal PC HDD.
 
It could also be that CD encoding is significantly faster on the G4 due to AltiVec -- music encoding benefits a lot from the vector processor of AltiVec... no dedicated vector processor on the new Intels probably means that even though the processor is technically faster, you'll see similar ripping speeds to older, slower G4 processor-based machines.
 
The Intel chips have a similar thing to Altivec but it's not as capable. It might be that iTunes hasn't been optimized for it yet.
 
Well, not really. For RC5, my 1.4GHz G4 can do 14 million keys per second, whereas the new Intel Macs can only do about 3 million per second. They don't have an optimized core yet on the Intel side so that's why. The G4 is actually about as fast as the G5 for this task because there's no G5 optimized core, just the G4 core which will run on the G5.

I guess it'd depend on the application but for some stuff the G4 is actually really fast.
 
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