Audio Encoding

In this benchmark, we took an ordinary audio disc (Terminator 2 soundtrack) and imported it into Apple iTunes 7, using high quality settings and a 160 kb/s bitrate. Although iTunes clearly is thread-optimized, it cannot benefit from the additional cores when using a Core 2 quad core processor.

Lame is a native audio (WAV) to MP3 converter. Again here, we use the extracted audio content to see how fast the different processors can encode wave audio into Fraunhofer's MP3 format.