Is this slow performance when importing CD's into iTunes ?

Question

Hi,
My new iMac 20" arrived this weekend. Since then I've been getting acquainted, being new to Macs. I wanted to build up my iTunes library, so I grabbed a box of my CDs and began importing them one by one. I was expecting my new iMac to really fly through them after reading the reviews of how much faster the new Core 2 Duo are over previous iMacs. I remember a table of stats in the MacWorld reviews, and for iTunes test, these machines were clocked at under 2 minutes for whatever it was they ripped in iTunes. YMMV certainly applies, but I was setting my expectation that my iMac could rip a CD in 2 - 3 minutes.
Umm, my experience is way off that. In fact, I would say my iMac took about as long to rip a CD as my 7 year old Dell PC with 256 MB of mem and a first gen Pent 5.
I decided to pick a CD and time how long it takes to import on my iMac, then take same CD and time how long it takes to import into iTunes on his new PC.
CD - Rush, Moving Pictures, 7 songs, 39.8 min, 403.1 MB
Encoding - AAC, 192 kbps
My rig - iMac 20", 2 GB RAM, 256 MB VRAM, Core 2 Duo and 250 HB with latest version of OS X
My son's rig - intel D955xbklkr socket 775 atx mobo, intel pentium D840 3.2 GHz processor, Corsair twinx pc5400 DDR2 667 Mhz mem ( 2 x 1024 mb ), HD - Seagate 250 GB SATA2 7K with 16 MB buffer, Pioneer DVR-111D DVD burner, and XFX 7600GS extreme graphics card, Win XP Pro, SP2 ( we built this beast with gaming in mind, with his own money ) * the CPU and memory are NOT overclocked and no other tweaks. just build it, install it and run it.
The results:
iMac - 7 minutes
PC - 2 minutes
I ran the import twice on each machine and came up with the same results.
Neither machine was running anything else at the time.
Granted there are some differences between the machines that should account for some differences, especially on the hard drive, with SATA2 and a nice 16 MB cache ( it's one sweet HD ) on the PC, but this difference is huge. We're not talking 20, 40 or 60 % faster on the PC. This was > 3x faster, so basically over 300% faster.
Anyone have an idea ? Without digging into the specs, I'd say the DVD drives should be able to read equally fast, the Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz with 4 MB cache should be equal if not superior to the older, D 820 3.2 GHz, the memory is the same speed, but I'm not sure about system bus speed on the P C ( 800 MHz ? ). Graphics cards don't factor into this equation, but the HD probably plays a big role, and I think the Seagate in my son's PC has the iMac beat hands down.
What are other iMac C2D owners seeing for average import times ?
Thanks,
Bill

Answer 1

Trevor,
When you say your superdrive rips, the import speeds are typically around 20x, what encoding method and bit rate are you using ?
I imported another CD and watched for what import speed numbers were displayed. Routinely, they hovered around 8x and sometimes up to 12 or 13x, but never higher. I was told by someone at our local user's group meeting that ripping at AAC 192kbps was a double-pass, I think that was the words they used, and therefore slower. ( Many members thought 7 minutes to rip was typical ) I'm not so sure if that means the drive will only spin at half it's rated max speed ? Anyway, I walked over to my son's PC with the CD and ripped it at AAC 192kbps to his iTunes library. The numbers I saw were from 18x to frequently 23, 24 and sometimes briefly to about 26x. His drive has a max of 40x. By my reasoning, anything that would cause iTunes to rip this CD at a slower speed, whether due to the encoding rate or the CD's surface condition, should affect both computers equally, yes ? Yet the drive on the PC performed on average at twice the rate of the iMac. I think it's safe to say the rip speed is comfortably within the operating margins of both drives.
I'm not yet fully convinced this is normal for an iMac. My CD are in excellent shape. I'm the only one who uses them and I handle them with about as much care as the old audiofiles used to when they handled their vinyl LPs ( well, at least not as far as wearing cotton gloves and sweeping the dust off ). Most of them have absolutely no visible scratches or oily finger prints on their surfaces. I might experiment and see what rates I get if I use MP3 or a lower bit rate for AAC.
Bill