Ripping with iTunes!

Apple's new CD/MP3 music application, iTunes, was updated to v1.1 last week. We decided to see how fast it rips (extracts a track from an audio CD and encodes it as an MP3 file on the hard drive) on a variety of Macs. We launched iTunes and inserted our CD of favorite golden oldies and ripped a 276 second track of Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee".

Ripping is simple, one just clicks on the "Import" button on the upper right of iTunes' window and everything else it automatic. The top center window with the black Apple logo displays the progress, time remaining and the rip rate, i.e. the playback time of the song divided by the time it takes to rip it. Here are the average results of three rips each, with one surprise:

Macintosh	CPU MHz	Total Time*	Rip Rate**
Power Mac 7300 (G3 upgraded)	400	112	2.5x
PowerBook (2000)	400	103	3.3x
Power Mac G3 B&W	450	87	3.9x
G4 Cube	450	140	2.1x
Power Mac G4 533DP	533(2)	37	8.2x

*In seconds by stopwatch; **As displayed by iTunes

Obviously, Apple's new Power Mac G4 533DP with two 533 MHz G4 CPUs at 8.2x really blows everything else away because iTunes is multiple processor aware. The older Power Mac 7300 despite being upgraded with a 400 MHz G3 is limited by its relateively slow 8x CD ROM drive and 50 MHz system bus speed. The surprise was the 450 MHz G4 Cube being so slow, even with a G4 with an Altivec unit. We suspect it was caused by the slow speed of the DVD ROM. Note also that the rip rate displayed by iTunes is higher than simply dividing the song's length (276 sec) by the total rip time. The rip rate displayed was the same for each rip except for those done on the G4 Cube where different rip rates from 2.1x to 3.9x were displayed for each rip--weird.

With iTunes, Apple has made ripping songs off audio CDs as MP3 files, assembling a playlist and burning a new audio CD (see our 533DP review) as simple and easy as it can possibly be.