#1 Burning Software

Hello all,

I have written a commercial application for ripping CDs to disk from multiple CD-ROMs simultaneously. The first version used the AK-RIP library and worked brilliantly. For compatibility reasons I needed to convert from AK-RIP to StarBurn. My problem is this: It seems that StarBurn slows down when ripping from multiple drives. In other words, if I rip from one drive, I can rip perhaps 10 discs an hour. If I rip from two drives, I used to get almost double the throughput, or 20 discs an hour, but with StarBurn I still only get 10 discs an hour. Just to make myself clear, it seems that StarBurn is only capable of ripping a certain amount of data per second, no matter how many drives it rips from. Is there something I can do about this? Am I using it incorrectly? Solving this loss of speed is critical for the success of my application!

There could be quite a lot of reasons why it happens. Improper design, too much memory allocated, no async I/O etc etc etc. Tell us more about how your app is written and we'll try to help you to sort the bottleneck out.

Well, I'm not sure what kind of information you're looking for but here goes...

The app is a fairly standard multi-threaded MFC dialog based app written in C++. Each drive is ripped from in it's own thread. I call StarBurn_CdvdBurnerGrabber_Create() to access the drives, and request a 64MB buffer for each of them. Each thread runs at the same priority level and the apps process level is raised to "real-time". I'm not sure which I/O you're referring to with the async question, HD, CD-ROM? And what is considered proper design?

1) Initialize device with 1 (ONE) megabyte of cache (0 allocated default). You don't need ANY memory for grabbing. So in your case you're just wasting the resources.

2) Use CreateEx instead of Create. This would make StarBurn to use native SCSI Pass Thru Interface instead of ASPI wrapper.

3) Apply 1) and 2) and let us know did it help or not.

Brilliant! Everything works perfectly now, thanks for your help!

Nice to know we've been helpful