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chirpie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 23, 2010
646
183
OK, here's the run down. I have a friend (yes, it's one of those posts) who thinks he's seeing substandard speed. I had him run everything down with me, and I thought he was actually not that bad off, but I'll let others weigh in.

First, machine specs:

- iMac Summer 2011 3.4 ghz i7 27inch - 16 RAM GB
- 1 TB standard hard drive
- OS 10.7.3
- Soundtrack Pro 3

Second, his speed experiences

- With a file copied to the desktop, it is opened inside the program. The file is an mp3 format file, it's about 5 hours long, and it's roughly about 500 mb which means to me it's a pretty high bitrate mp3 file.(probably the max of 320kbs if not close to it)

- To open the file in Soundtrack, and have soundtrack "draw" the entire waveform, it takes it about 1:30 to 2 minutes.

- Once it has been chopped down to about 1 hour and saved out, the resulting saved file takes just under a minute.


He has hundreds of hours left he needs to process and is wishing these steps were faster. So my question is, where's the current speed bottle neck in his setup? I personally think it's in either the speed of the hard drive or in the fact that Soundtrack Pro isn't capable of taking advantage of all his processing power.

So in the end, he could either:

1 - Buy a thunderbolt solid state external drive
2 - Buy a different audio editing program that can take advantage of his computer's processing power
3 - Leave it be, because he's not that bad off.

I'd totally appreciate thoughts on it. ^_^;
 

CFoss

macrumors 6502
Feb 26, 2011
271
1
The HDD is probably the bottleneck. However, the amount of time to move the audio files onto the SSD will probably make this increased speed negligible.
 

dknightd

macrumors 6502
Mar 7, 2004
334
1
The editing program has to convert the mp3 to pcm before it can draw the waveform and do its work.
He *might* gain some speed converting from mp3 to aaif (and back) outside of the editing program. It would be worth trying once. If soundtrack loads the aiff faster than the mp3, then he can gain even more efficiency by having some cores busy with the conversions, while others load up the file for editing.
 
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