Slow mp3 encoding under Vista.

[gilmoua]

Dear experts,

I have been using audacity for about 4 years.

I recently purchased a new HP Pavilion dv5 Notebook PC running Vista Home Premium
Machine has 2Gb ram, Intel Core Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26 GHz
and has plenty of disk space.

I have Norton 360 installed.

I routinely produce a 10min audio file which I save as .mp3 at 64kbs for use on community radio.
On my previous Acer Powermate running XP, it takes about 20 secs to encode the file.
Similarly on a 64bit HP machine running XP (also with Norton) takes about 20 seconds.

However, this new machine takes 2 minutes to encode the file!

I downloaded the latest Lame encoder and latest version of Audacity but that did not help.
I do not understand why the new machine faster machine should be 5 times slower!

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

Arthur

[steve]

Since you mentioned Norton - does it make any difference if you temporarily disable Norton?

[gilmoua]

I wondered whether Norton was the issue and spent an hour on their support line trying to find out how to tempoarily shut it down.
Turning off all the Norton components so they are not activated at startup did not help.
Simple deactivation of the firewall did not help.
Being not connected to the Internet did not help.

Norton installed on the other HP machine running XP does not have the problem.

I have not actually uninstalled Norton, which would be the next step down that path.
====
Also, Audacity has now crashed 3 times on this Vista machine referring to program ntdll.dll

I gave up using audacity 1.3 several years ago because it crashed frequently (under XP).
The recent crashes on the Vista machine have occurred with the older 1.2.6 version and with the latest download
while just cutting and pasting small corrections in a 10 inute audio file. I did manage this time to
recover using the recovery program aud_recover which sure beats starting from scratch.

[steve]

Norton installed on the other HP machine running XP does not have the problem.

Do you mean that Exporting MP3's from Audacity on other machines works OK?

I gave up using audacity 1.3 several years ago because it crashed frequently (under XP).

There have been a number of issues causing crashes of Audacity in recent versions, many of which have been fixed in the latest version. (I'm not sure of any outstanding issues as Audacity 1.3.7 has only just been released).

Audacity 1.3 is generally recommended for Vista (most users report that it works better than 1.2.6) and crash recovery is much better in recent 1.3 versions.

[gilmoua]

Dear friends,

I downloaded 1.3.7 and have used it for 4 days now under Vista without any crashes.

Encoding .mp3 takes a minute for a 10minute audio file (at 64kbs) which is half the time
that 1.2.6 was taking under Vista on my system, although still 3 times longer than 1.2.6 under XP takes.

But I can live with that.

Thats for the help.

Arthur