Comments, and a question re compression

[Stuart Fraser]

Hi,

After asking some preliminary questions, I took the plunge and bought a B2. Thanks to those of you who responded and helped me make up my mind.  It arrived about a week ago, and I had the content of my JB7 on a HD ready to be transferred. That took some time, but I've been using the B2 for nearly a week now. I have a couple of comments, and a question.

I prefer the JB7 as a physical object. I feel it looks better, and has a more solid feel. Also, I could press the round buttons on the front of the JB7 without using my other hand to hold the unit steady. With the smaller buttons on the B2 I need to hold the unit steady with one hand while pressing the button, or it slides around if i don't.

Actually physically loading CDs into the B2 seems to be a bit "hit and miss". Perhaps there is a knack I haven't yet got, but I often don't get the smooth loading experience I had with the JB7

Using an external CD drive does make loading very much faster, but I do need to echo some other posters' question. Why should this be? It is rather counter-intuitive to buy an item specifically to transfer your CDs, only to be told you should use another piece of equipment to perfrom a significant part of the task you have just bought a £500+ machine to do. If using the integral slot causes too much wear and tear on the B2, why not do away with the slot, and use the space to incorporate a standard CD-Drive?

I do like the online UI. It is pretty basic, but hopefully more functionality may be added in future. Although I am quite familiar with the remote, the more that can be done without it, the better.

I haven't used even half of the menu options on the B2, but again, I am quite impressed with some of the functions which can now be performed so much more easily than on the JB7.

My question concerns compression times. Last night I transferred 223 tracks, 14 albums, totalling around 2GB (10CDs through the CD input on the B2, and 4 full albums from a USB drive). These took a full 12 hours to compress. This rate is verging on unworkable. Going at that rate, even if I am loading CDs daily, it will be many months before my collection will be fully loaded. Is this compression rate typical? Or is my machine operating slower than it should? If this is operating as it should, is there anything I can do to speed things up. I want to be able to listen to the B2 during the day, so ideally I'd want it to be compressing for no more than eight hours overnigh each day. Am I really only going to be able to load 10CDs a day?

As always, thanks in anicpation for your answers/comments.

[David L Raines]

I went for the LG Drive for $60 and never looked back.  It sits under the B2 and I rip 40-50 discs a day while sitting at my desk.  Then I let the commission happen when I'm not there (typically overnight).  I only at my home office desk for a few hours.  The LG is just so fast.  Yes it's a shame that the B2 basically has an old laptop drive in it, but I got over that quickly when I saw how fast the LG is. 

So, you should be good with a 40-50 RIP and overnight compression.  Some days I rip 100 discs and I go away for the weekend and they are done. 

[Rob Harriman]

Hi Stuart,

I agree that 12 hours to compress 14 CDs seems very slow.

I am assuming this is not including the time taken to load them via the internal CD drive and USB you mention.

The B2 web pages discuss compression in some detail - worth checking out whether you've got it set to FLAC or mp3, as the latter is much slower.

Rob

[Daniel Taylor]

I get around both of the problems you mention:  problems with the CD drive and compression time.  I rip all my CDs on my computer.  I use dBpoweramp CD Ripper, but there are many other programs that do the same thing.  Then I copy the folders to a USB stick and to 1 of 2 of my backup drives during the same session.  Reasons:  It's much faster; and I can control the quality of the information much easier (misspellings, wrong data, etc.); and I populate the tagging metadata, for future-proofing my files for use by other software or hardware.

Basically, the only time I use my B2's CD drive is to test things for questions in the forum.  I don't have problems with CDs being ejected prematurely, or with problems finding the information in the B2's database, or with corrupted data on the HDD during the ripping process.

[Stuart Fraser]

It's the compression time, not the loading time, which is the problem. Maybe I didn't make that clear, but David's suggestion doesn't really address my problem.

Rob, Yes, it was fully 12 hours from selecting the "Compress Now" option on the menu. I am set at MP3 at 256, as my JB7's files were at MP3 at 320. I've already got a dozen CDs loaded and compressing today, But I'll try tomorrow with it set to FLAC. Hopefully that may make a difference.

I'll report back over the weekend.

Thanks

[Stuart Fraser]

Daniel,

Thanks for that. I've been trying various permutations. To me though, it boils down to a bit of an inadequacy in the product itself. If you're doing all that work on your PC, you've basically spent £500+ on an MP3 player, and that's not what I thought I was buying.

[JFBUK]

Hi Stuart,

I rip to FLAC on my PC and the upload using the Web UI.

As a comparison I just ripped two CDs on my PC using DbPoweramp and uploaded them to my B2

The rip of an 11 track 53 minute CD took 2 min 12 sec in DbPoweramp

The upload of 28 tracks across two CDs , 710Mb of FLAC files to the B2 took just over 10 minutes across my wifi network.

John

[Rob Harriman]

Hi Stuart,

I suspect your issue is the fact that you're compressing to MP3 rather than FLAC.

Like you I compress via the B2, which works fine and at a rough ballpark takes < 15 mins to compress an average CD to FLAC.

I did invest in an external CD drive to reduce the ripping times and also to prevent wear on the internal drive, which I agree is poor.

The rest of the B2 functionality has been rock-solid for me.  It's not necessary to invest in dbpoweramp or similar unless you're wedded to meta tag data for organising your CD library

Rob

[Mark Fishman]

Martin Brennan has pointed out several times that the JB7 was much faster than the B2 at compressing *to MP3* because the JB7 used his own performance-tuned code to create MP3s, whereas the B2 uses standard Linux tools for that task. So the slow speed of compression that you are experiencing is almost certainly due  to your having chosen MP3 as the "target" format.

Unless you are severely cramped for hard disc space in the B2, FLAC -- which is lossless and preserves the full quality of the CD -- is likely a better choice. It will be faster, too, although it produces larger files than MP3 (approx 1/2 original size instead of approx 1/5).

[Daniel Taylor]

A word to the wise:  there have been times when a person learning about various advantages of converting to FLAC rather than MP3 have decided to convert their MP3 files to FLAC.  There is no advantage to doing that.  Musical data and quality lost during the conversion to MP3 cannot be restored by converting from MP3 to FLAC.  The only thing you'll get is a larger file.

Hi Stuart,

Your comment on the B2 basically being an MP3 player is fairly accurate.  It has many features that many people value.  The chief features that I appreciate the most are the music storage and the WebUI to control it; also the fact that it can be viewed as NAS.  There are some features in which I have been disappointed, mostly the CD drive and the ripping/compressing abilities.  But it does what I need most, so I'm okay with it.

[PMB]

Hi Stuart,

I have used the internal CD Drive to rip my modest collection of around 1,000 CDs without any problems. Some discs are slow but a typical CD takes 4-5 minutes to rip.

Compression is slow, so we suggest ripping 20-30 CDs in a session and leaving the B2 powered overnight to compress. I have compression set to FLAC (the default setting) so unable to comment on whether MP3 compression takes longer.

I fairly sure that you will not be able to hear any difference between the MP3 320k tracks and those saved in FLAC, so you could consider changing to FLAC for the rest of your collection.

Hi Peter Lowham,

Have you done any experiments on MP3 compression?

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Paul,

Yes, I did some tests on compression timings a while ago; I was working on how to best reconstruct my total collection of 'music' (20,000 tracks of 7,000 flsc + 20,000 mp3) and the 'mirror' folders.

I have the compression figures wriiten down so I'll resurrect those and will post an update here as soon as I find them.

Regards,

Peter.

[Peter Lowham]

Hi Stuart,

I have found the results of the compression tests that I ran a while ago.  The test comprised of taking a typical album and running the ripping and compression on the same album using different settings.

So, the album has 10 tracks and 42 minutes of music time.

B2 Compression setting               Rip Time.       Compression Time

    mp3 256 Kbit/sec.                      7 mins.                  39 mins.

   mp3 128 Kbits/sec.                     7 mins.                  38 mins.

   flac                                                 7 mins.                  17 mins. 

   flac + mp3                                    7 mins.                   52 mins.

dBpoweramp  mp3 256Kbit/sec      n/a                        2 mins. (but check cautionary note below).

You can see from the data set above that the 'flac' compression is much faster than 'mp3'.  The rip time of 7 minutes is repectable (X 6) for this type of CD drive unit.

The compression time that you have quoted (223 tracks)  is absolutely normal for mp3 compression on the B2.  My estimate for 223 tracks comes up with 13 hours, based on the data given above so that looks normal to me and is quite close to your finding.

Do you have a specific reason for compressing to mp3 rather than flac?  Those 223 tracks  would compress in a little over 6 hours using flac, so it's more than twice as fast.

I do use mp3 compression in order to generate mp3 files for use in my cars.  My solution is to use an application on my Windows server called 'dBpoweramp'.  This app will take one music format and convert it into another.  So I have it set to take my flac files and convert them to mp3.  This is very fast, as you can see above, but I use a Data Centre server with 8 CPUs and 64GB of memory, so I would not expect to get that level of perfomance on a normal laptop or PC.  However it would still be much faster than the B2.  I have about 7000 flac files and dBpoweramp produces these in mp3 format in one 22 hour run.

The reason that an external CD drive is considerably faster  than the B2's internal CD drive is very simple.  The B2's CD drive is a 'ultraslim' format, made for extreme compactness.  This means that the internal CD's drive motor is much smaller physically and therefore has a lower performance factor than the larger drawer type CD drives.  It is a tradeoff between compactness and performance.  

Personally I'm fine with the B2's CD drive.  I have ripped hundreds of CDs over almost 5 years and the drive has worked very well, with perhaps 5 - 10 CDs rejected over those years. I treat the CD drive with care; I don't force the CDs into the slot, and I have never had a problem with it.  So the drive is fit for purpose, it's just that some people want the job done more quickly, and that is their perogative.

I have, however repaired for friends a number of laptops fitted with these ultraslim drives.  Apple MacBooks are fitted with this type of unit.  Faults ranged from CDs inserted upside down, irregularly shaped (non circular) CDs, 3 inch CDs (that conversation went as follows: "how did you insert that?"; reply "Oh, I used a coffee stirrer to poke the CD further into the slot").

Regards,

Peter.

[Stuart Fraser]

Thanks for all your comments. I had my music on the JB7 in MP3 format, because the JB7 was initially populated with 100Gb+ of data from a large MP3 player which had, at the time held a large proportion of my collection in MP3 format. I decided just to keep going to maintain uniformity, and also because the JB7 had a much more limited capacity.

Paul, Rob and Peter - I have now tested compressing the data ripped as FLAC, and, like you, I find an average CD takes 12-15 minutes to compress. This is much more workable, as I can now compress around 30 CDs overnight. It will still take me a couple of months to get everything onto the B2, and it'll be touch and go whether I can get the whole collection on to the B2 (I definitely could not rip my whole CD collection onto the B2 as FLAC - the fact that I have so many already ripped to MP3 may give me enough space).

I have been using dBpoweramp for a few years for a variety of "clean-up" tasks relating to my music files, so I now use it to rip those CDs which the B2 does not recognise. So far there have only been 12 of those, and oddly dBpoweramp recognised all but one of those which B2 had failed to recognise, It's actually really simple, as I can have the settings convert CDs into exactly the file name format required for the B2. (i am actually wondering whether I should just rip ALL my CDs here, and transfer them over by USB whenever I have about 30 ready to go.)

Things are going much better now. I do like the B2 (although I still prefer the JB7), but I have to admit to being a little disappointed that, with a product at this price point, users need to emply "workarounds", not to achieve optimal performance, but to perform basic functions which the unit really be able to cope with itself without difficulty. I find myself agreeing with the many comments expressed elsewhere on the forum, stating that this product is not really market-ready.

[PMB]

Hi Stuart,

Thank you for the user feedback and useful comments.

Paul

Brennan Support.