Windows Vista SP2 Beta vs Vista SP1:Battle of the Service Packs

Audio Encoding

For our Audio encoding tests we used the Gladiator Soundtrack (Awesome movie btw!) . We converted the audio tracks to wav files on our hard drive and did the encoding tests with that. There were 17 wav files, with a total size of 622MB.

The encoding was carried out with Foobar music player v 0.9.6. Foobar was chosen for this purpose because this software can use all the available CPU cores in the system to do the conversion. It does this by converting each song file on an available core. Thus all the four cores were used on our Q9450 each time we did the conversion. The theory behind this is that if the CPU is loaded is 100% during each conversion on each OS, it reduces the error that may be induced due to fluctuation in load by software that is not multi-threaded.

Here’s how the taskbar CPU usage looks like while the encoding takes place. Note the 100% usage.

MP3 Conversion

We employed the services of the most popular mp3 encoder, LAME. LAME v 3.98.2 was used for this test. The time was measured by the encoding timer on the Foobar conversion window.

The encoder seetings were V0 Best Quality ( ~ 245Kbps). Fast Mode (-vbr -new) was used.

Both the OSes end up having the same encoding time.

AAC Conversion

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit rates. iTunes AAC is the most popular usage of this format.

For this test we used the freely available Nero AAC encoder v 1.3.3.0. The settings for this encoder were VBR Q1.00 Best Quality (~400Kbps).

Vista SP2 Beta is faster by 11% in this test. Another victory for Vista SP2 Beta.