Importing CD's is SLOW!
Well, actually this is the only real gripe I'm having with my iMac so far...
Back in my Windows XP with WMP10 days, importing an entire cd took like 2 minutes max and often only a minute. In iTunes, it easily takes up to 8 minutes now... when cd's start it's like at 5,6X, and near the end it sometimes goes up to 13X but seldomly surpasses 10X.
Is this normal? I supposed my new Core 2 Duo would handle AAC-encoding a bit faster than my old P4 3,0 Ghz... even my P4 1,6GHz was faster at importing CD's than my new iMac with iTunes. I tried encoding in MP3 but it's the same speed still.
Back in my Windows XP with WMP10 days, importing an entire cd took like 2 minutes max and often only a minute. In iTunes, it easily takes up to 8 minutes now... when cd's start it's like at 5,6X, and near the end it sometimes goes up to 13X but seldomly surpasses 10X.
Is this normal? I supposed my new Core 2 Duo would handle AAC-encoding a bit faster than my old P4 3,0 Ghz... even my P4 1,6GHz was faster at importing CD's than my new iMac with iTunes. I tried encoding in MP3 but it's the same speed still.
Comments
I generally find the superdrives to be quite poor in terms of performance. I have an external tray loading firewire drive that is often double the speed of my slot-loading internal. It's just another example of Apple compromising performance to save space.
What you can try is copying one of the audio files from the cd onto your hard drive and then import than into itunes and that will narrow it down to a drive problem.
Geez... I have a 1.83 MacBook and I get at least 11x minimum, and that's when my CPU is maxed with other tasks. Must really be the drive speed. Are the superdrives slower than the combos?
I have a combo these days and I figured they were about the same - I never want to pay extra for a superdrive again. I just did a quick test between my combo internal and my tray loading external.
internal -> MP3 160 -> 2 minutes 57
internal -> AAC 128 -> 2 minutes 55
external -> AAC 128 -> 2 minutes 10
external -> MP3 160 -> 1 minute 48
This was for a CD with only 42 minutes of audio so only half a disc. It definitely gets faster as the process goes on - I've seen my external as high as 30x.
In this test, the internal started at 10x and went up to about 20x.
The external started at 20x and went up to 25x.
I then tested a full 80 minute CD and the difference really starts to show up.
internal -> AAC 128 -> 8 minutes 32
external -> AAC 128 -> 4 minutes 8
In this test, the internal just barely got above 10x but the external sat quite happily around 20x for the entire import.
My external is about 3 years old and I've seen drives that are faster still very cheap and these are the drives they put in PCs. Because of Apple's designs, they simply can't use those kinds of drives in anything except a tower *cough*.
So if you need high speed importing, I'd say to get an external firewire enclosure and put a fast cheap IDE drive in it. It also saves wear on the internal and allows you to duplicate discs much more easily. Plus you don't have to fumble about the side of the machine to get the disc in the slot. Of course this adds to the desktop clutter that the iMac is supposed to cut down.
With newer cds I'm able to consistently get 13-16x on my PowerBook's superdrive... older cds are much slower, usually in the 5-9x range.
Don't hate the player - hate the game
BTW - the Core chip/architecture isn't just a "bit" faster than a Pentium 4... it's leaps and bounds. Apple wouldn't have made the switch were performance of the new chips merely comparable to the Pentium. Personally, I'm still not down with the Intel machines yet... I'll be riding the PPC train for as long as humanly possible!