Music library conversion to SSD slows down overnight

[Bill Av]

I’m re-encoding my library from Apple Lossless to 256 AAC (previously, I had 128 AAC files). There are over 30,000 files to be processed, so it’s going to take a few days. However, I noticed that overnight the amount of files being processed dropped from fifteen files per minute to three per minute. My library now resides on an external SSD. Is there any reason for the drop in speed?

 

[bug]

That seems like a big drop, but there are a number of housekeeping tasks that generally run at night. Some hit the CPU pretty good and might slow this down.

I would not expect that big of a drop though. Do you know what time the drop happens? Is it a specific time? Is it a sudden drop off or a gradual reduction?

...is your computer near a heat vent that is only coming on at night and may be thermally throttling the machine (that's a super shot in the dark but just throwing some ideas out there!)

 

[Bill Av]

As far as I can tell, the drop is pretty sudden. It almost looks as if Music starts to take it easy with the encoding when the screen turns off. When it wakes, the speed goes back to normal.

 

[bug]

If you have ‘power nap’ enabled try turning it off. I had some unusual problems with externally mounted drives and turning off power nap fixed it.

I’m really just putting out some ideas here so not really confident that will work, but its free to try!

 

[Bill Av]

I set my screen lock time for longer than normal and allowed Music to play songs with the sound down. The conversions over the past seven hours seem to be progressing nicely. I had been playing videos through the TV application with the screensaver on, but that didn’t help.