What's the matter with flac format?

camaron · Post by **camaron** » Wed Mar 09, 2011 1:47 am

I've been meaning to bring this up for a while. Most of my music is flac but recently I've been dealing with some mp3 files. To make it short:
Guayadeque seems to edit mp3 files 10 faster than flac!! This is not a scientific assertion but if I measured it I think it would be even faster than that (or slower for flac..). Basically batch eding for mp3 seem to be near instant and for flac takes a while, the screen greys out etc

Because I'd never really used mp3 before I thought this was normal, but is it? I feel bloody jealous now that I'm losing out on this power

So why is this, is it a bug, expected behaviour, etc?

camaron · Post by **camaron** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 5:25 am

Any thoughts on this anonbeat?

I've just done this to give you some real numbers: I've copied and then converted into mp3 about 4 gigas of flac files (300 tracks aprox.). I've changed the composer tag on the mp3 files (1.3 gb) and has taken 4 seconds!!!!

I've then changed the same tag to the flac files and has taken about 8 minutes!!!! that's an order of about 100 times faster in favour of the mp3 files.

Goodness me, 4 seconds...

They were both in the same partition, a ntfs file system.

4 seconds....

camaron · Post by **camaron** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 5:39 am

Second round: 4 seconds and 6 minutes respectively

anonbeat · Post by **anonbeat** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 5:52 am

The read/write of flac files are done by taglib and libflac. The guayadeque work is the same on mp3s than on flac files.

I will try to speed it up

Thanks for your help

camaron · Post by **camaron** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 6:09 am

Thanks for yours

I'm anxiously awaiting improvement on this

anonbeat · Post by **anonbeat** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 6:35 am

I have checked and what slows down is the album art embedding.

Have you tried with other tools to embed album art into flac files ?

anonbeat · Post by **anonbeat** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 7:06 am

Can you try with svn revision 1525 and report back please ?

camaron · Post by **camaron** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 8:35 am

Same 300 flac files, same change of tag (composer): 5 minutes.

Nothing to do with album art, anonbeat, to keep the thing clean and simple i'm just using the same tag:
composer: Monteverdi, Claudio (1567-1643) composer: Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750)

camaron · Post by **camaron** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 8:36 am

mp3: 4 seconds again

camaron · Post by **camaron** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 9:28 am

Update: I've changed the same tag to the same files, this time inside ext4 and has taken "only" 2'30''. It is an obvious improvement but still miles away from mp3 performance. I'm still investigating. I'll keep you posted