Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler dbPowerAmp - true multitasking

Probably nothing new for some of you but last night I went to re-install EAC to rip CDs and thought I'd try out the simpler (but with a cost) version of dbPowerAmp. So I downloaded the trial version for Windows 7.

After it ripped the first song, I noticed it used one CPU core to start encoding it to flac but it used the second CPU core to start ripping song number two at the same time.

I tried using it to convert the resulting flacs to MP3 instead of ripping them again and saw that it began working on translating song #1 with Core1 and Core2 was already working on song number 2.

A lot of software can utilize 2 or more cores nowadays but I didn't expect to see it work so well in just ripping software. Kinda cool. I might even break down and pay for it vs. the tricky setup to make EAC work for free. OK, well maybe anyways.

As you said, nothing new. I've been running multiple CPUs/cores for almost 10 years now. I have a friend who says, "I only use one program at a time. Why should I have more than one core?" Just looking at the process list shows that statement to be false, there are always multiple programs each asking for a little CPU time.

EAC wasn't even designed for multiple core support. It just happens because it launches the encoder as a separate process. Because one CPU is already in use, the next least loaded one gets the new process assigned to it. Simple, and automatic.

My current home computer has 8 cores (two Opteron Quads), but as soon as they become readily available I'm upgrading it to two Six Cores.

Yes, 2 cores is nothing new or fancy and it's normally being utilized with processes being assigned to both at the same time, even when you don't realize it. I just didn't expect to see it so blatantly in DBPoweramp. I used what was almost assuredly an older version about a year ago in XP it wasn't segregating it's tasks in this way.

As I said in another post, I get exited at the most unimportant things.