Importing AIFF songs via Music vs. Automator action ... big dfference in speed

MartinR wrote:

I have a boatload of AIFF songs that I want to import into Music. When I tested importing a few AIFF files, Music imported the AIFFs directly as AIFFs even though I had set Music > Settings > Files > Import Settings to AAC Encoder > iTunes Plus. • (I don't understand why it didn't encode to AAC as it should have but that's not my question here.)

The Import Settings options affect new rips from CD, or conversions from existing (could even be the same) format. Files added to the library from local storage are not transcoded, but added in their current format.

Once in Music, I converted the AIFFs to AAC ... but that was an additional step plus it resulted with BOTH AIFF & AAC versions of each song, which meant that I had to do a third step to delete the AIFFs after they were converted. (Too many steps in total.)

Sure, but that is how it works.

I then figured out that I could set up an Automator Workflow to convert & import the AIFFs into Music in a single step. The Automator Workflow is a simple two-step action:

Ask for Finder Items

• Import audio files ... using AAC Encoder

This works great, and the result is just AACs in Music.

But I discovered that importing AIFFs via the Automator Workflow is way faster than converting the AIFFS in Music! In fact, converting AIFFs to AAC in Music seems to take just as long as if I were importing songs from a CD! But importing via the Automator Action happens almost immediately.

Any ideas as to why there would be this difference in how long it takes to encode AIFFs to AAC in Music vs. the Automator Action? I would not have expected any difference.

None at all. I would expect transcoding to take a similar amount of time regardless of which app/OS feature was doing it. Very strange.

tt2