I still buy CDs occasionally; I rip them as ALACs and then back them up to a hard drive. I also buy ALAC files from Qobuz. Either way, I down-convert the ALAC files to iTunes + for playback on my phone and computer. On my 27" 2012 iMac, the conversion from ALAC to AAC would happen at 99x speed. Encoding seems to top out at 16x on my Mac Studio. As a test, I re-encoded the same ALACs on my 2012 Mac mini. They encoded at 60x speed. I realize that ripping CDs is a thing of the past, but why would ten year old computers be blowing the doors of "the latest and greatest" on such a mundane task?
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Music encoding speed - very slow on Mac Studio
- Thread starter Bill Av
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The Music app. I have a number of others, but I prefer Music. I've been using it since it was SoundJam MP.
I'd say that it's definitely software. I converted the same selection of songs with Music (formerly iTunes) and with To Audio Converter. It took Music… 9 minutes and 10 seconds. To Audio Converter took less than a minute - and it's still an Intel app.
Sounds like a threading issue. One is single-threaded and the other runs multiple threads. Embarrassing that Apple didn't write it to use multiple threads.
Another issue is that Music converts one track at a time, while To Audio Converter does several at a time. I downloaded another converter made by MediaHuman and it's even faster (40 seconds) and it too is an Intel app.
It's a shame. Years ago, iTunes added the ability to down convert music as it was being transferred to your device. It wasn't usable (for me) due to the conversion time. I had hoped that M1 would have changed this, but Music doesn't seem up for the challenge.
It's a shame. Years ago, iTunes added the ability to down convert music as it was being transferred to your device. It wasn't usable (for me) due to the conversion time. I had hoped that M1 would have changed this, but Music doesn't seem up for the challenge.
Music was never really written for these kind of use cases. It is the dollar store tool: good enough, but free. Apple would really rather you buy music from them than mess around with other types of media, so why should the converter in Music be particularly strong?