Re: Lossless codec comparison - part 3: CDDA (May '22)

Reply #50 – 2023-05-26 10:10:08

Yes, this is all very complicated. However, the main conclusion I can draw is that adding buffering isn't necessarily an improvement for all common usage scenario's.

The things I tested (WAV->FLAC->WAV) on a USB-stick that is almost full and on an external HDD that is almost full are both very normal things to do. For the first case a performance improvement up to 10x was seen, which is *huge*. For the second case, a performance deterioration of 40% was seen, which is quite large.

It isn't particularly clear what should be chosen.

Re: Lossless codec comparison - part 3: CDDA (May '22)

Reply #51 – 2023-05-29 21:32:50

Dumb question, but: which file system(s)?

Re: Lossless codec comparison - part 3: CDDA (May '22)

Reply #52 – 2023-05-30 06:40:20

NTFS for the harddisk, exFAT for the USB-stick

Re: Lossless codec comparison - part 3: CDDA (May '22)

Reply #53 – 2023-05-30 09:10:42

Performance might be file system specific - and cluster size specific?
Windows defaults to 128 kibibytes clusters when formatting 32 GB and more to exFAT. And, I remember I recently checked a big (4 or 5 or 6 or 8 TB it must have been) USB hard drive out of the box - it came formatted as exFAT with even larger cluster size than default. That is quite some difference to a 4096 byte NTFS cluster, if that size matters at all.

Sure there is a need for a reasonable default, whatever that may be. But if you provided for a --buffer-size option, and a way to set default buffer size upon compile, then you would get some test results around here I guess, at least there were a few at https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,123025.0.html


(This is turning very FLAC-specific, but I guess that mods make better judgement as to whether to split the thread, and if so, where.)