I upgraded to a 120gb drive first thing... no problems yet with hard drive space...

Sean in NC

I'm at 80% right now, after 45 CDs over 10 hours. The math seems wrong. Even if it's *really* slow at encoding, that ... seems...

I suspect I might be also creating both 256 (central) and 128 (portable) files. Perhaps I should open the instruction manual...

-brendan

Yeah I think the default is to create some portable files too. It's under setup - recording quality.

For what it's worth, it was up to 84% full by the time I went to sleep (4am), according to the About screen. Woke up (10am), it's down to 80% full, and still says "Audio Compression Is In Progress".

From all I've read, the ARM encoder is fixed-point, perhaps that's why it's amazingly slow?

Still...very cool device.

-brendan

From all I've read, the ARM encoder is fixed-point, perhaps that's why it's amazingly slow?

The ARM encoder is amazingly fast considering the platform it runs on. The Rio Central has a 200MHz Strongarm, which, bearing in mind it's single-issue, has about the performance of a Pentium 133.

Peter

When I got mine I just kept feeding it cds until the drive got full and then I waited for it to finish encoding to feed it some more.

Yeah, but then you sat there wondering why it never finished encoding and why it was taking so long. You thought the machine had locked up.

still says "Audio Compression Is In Progress"

If you do ever get round to reading the manual, you'll see that the little "cogs" animation on the status-bar gives an indication that compression is still going on.

Peter

> The ARM encoder is amazingly fast considering the
> platform it runs on.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the encoder software itself was slow, only that the combined hardware/software platform was relatively slow compared to what I'm used to: two LAME encoders on a dual athlon 1900 system.

Obviously, the speed difference should be expected.

> If you do ever get round to reading the manual,

I went through the entire manual last night. But, point taken about posting before RTFM.

> you'll see that the little "cogs" animation on the status-bar
> gives an indication that compression is still going on.

I initially made that assumption. But when I turned off multi-cd mode at one point, the cogs went away??? Turning the mode back on made them reappear. So, I began to doubt that they represented compression going on...hence checking the about screen for the "Audio Compression In Progress" line.

-brendan

PS - device is super amazing cool!

In order to improve ripping speed, encoding gets suspended when you're ripping. We have no DMA - all disk I/O is done with load and store instructions, by the CPU. So we have to be clever to get ~10x rip speeds

Hugo

> In order to improve ripping speed, encoding gets
> suspended when you're ripping.

AHA!

I'm still at 80% for the last 3-4 hours (no movement on free space since I awoke), the gears are turning though. Haven't ripped anything since I awoke either.

Is it possible that by leaving it in multi-cd mode, it's actually not encoding at all, even if I'm not ripping CDs at the time? Overnight, I put the unit in standby, which allowed it to go from 84% to 80%...

-brendan

Yep. It appears if I put it into "standby", intead of "on", it encodes relatively fast (down to 77% now). Otherwise, it seems to just not encode at all. Running 1.02.

Downloaded the 1.10 ISOs last night, wonder if the upgrade will make any differences in encoding while on area?

Notably: I had no crashes while ripping. Not sure if that's because it's not configured for the internet or not yet. Sounds like the posted crashes were around the time of cddb lookups. Anyhow, the 1.10 is supposed to take care of that! I suppose there aren't release notes for 1.10, it being a post-end-of-life release? Didn't see any on rioaudio.com/digitalnetworksna.com nor in the zip file.

More fun...

-brendan