Accelerate analyzing

Can anyone advise me if it makes sense to increase the internal memory of my PC from 16gb to 32 or maybe even more, to speed up the analyzing process. I have a Windows 10 PC with I7 processor and a SSD M2 of 500gb as a C-drive and so currently 16gb of memory. I find that it takes too much time to analyze when I want to move an extensive music collection to my P4 with an SSD of 2 tb. If the answer is yes, how much faster will it be? Twice or 10 times faster?

Track analysis is a CPU bottlenecked process more than memory.

The branding of i7 processor doesn’t actually mean much these days, for all we know you could have a first gen i7, and intel have recently released their 10th gen versions.

Also intel have an annoying habit of disabling hyperthreading on some models, which effectively halves the performance in applications that take advantage of multiple threads.

1 Like

Thank you for your comment. I have to look it up, but it’s not a first generation but it’s also not a latest 10th gen. version.

Hi DJ Manis

Adding extra ram to the pc might make a very slight difference to processing speed but it’s probably only an increase of low single figures, if that.

If you’re interested, and this won’t help, it’s just for interest, you can see how well Engine Prime utilises your PCs processor cores by downloading a program called CPU ID. (Free €0.00)

I was surprised to find out a few months ago that not all i7 processors are quad core on mobile devices (laptops) some only seem dual core but if your i7 is quad core, then CPU ID will show you both hyper threads on each of the 4 cores working away when engine prime is analysing. The windows process/task view will show this to a more basic degree also. There are no controls or settings to adjust speed or anything like that, but if only 2 cores show up on your i7 then going to a full quad core, if you haven’t got that already, should produce quite a speed increase.

The other consideration is , once you get your main collection Exported out to the prime drive, which could take a few hours, you’ll only need to export small incremental updates/crates or playlists out to the prime drive, weekly, monthly etc. Those small exports shouldn’t take anything like as long as the main collection copying over.

Thanks for answering. I dowloaded the CPU-Z and it seems my processor is an Intel Core I7 6700 Skylake with 4 cores en 8 threads. And thanks for the consideration. I will follow your advice and make my music updates small.

1 Like

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6700+%40+3.40GHz&id=2598

Here You can find the full description of Your CPU, it is above 8000 points in the CPU rank, so it is not a bad one. Should be pretty fast if system can take the best out of it.

Waiting is certainly not my strongest point, I think. LOL

1 Like

The bottleneck there is the CPU can at max analyse 8 tracks in parallel, though as noted it’s not a bad CPU so each individual track will be analysed pretty quickly.

Upgrading to a 6 core/12 thread Intel CPU would give you a 50% boost for analysing a large number of files as it would be able to do 12 tracks in parallel, whilst going with something on the insane side of things like a 32 core threadripper from AMD would give a much greater performance boost.

However, I don’t think upgrading your CPU is worth it, and adding more RAM would be pretty negligible in terms of performance - for your full collection you only need to analyse it once so I would suggest starting the analysis and leaving it overnight.

Yes, you are right. Thanks for your advise.

If the source collection is already analysed, you don’t need to analyse the tracks again just because you are transferring to a P4 internal drive.

The analysis data follows the tracks to the P4 as long as you do the transferring in Engine Prime.

I’ve also considered getting an i9 octacore 16 thread macbook pro - its going to be my next buy once my current one is completely depreciated on the books