I regularly use AME to convert large collections of video files to AIFF audio only files. With CS55, I could drag'n'drop a 100+ files into AME, select-all, then pick an output format, and it would crank through them fairly quickly.
With AEM CS6, the first thing I noticed is that the UI gets progressively slower and slower as files are added to the queue with drag'n'drop. The first few files start adding quickly, but then it takes over a second per file once you get past 50 or so. Also, scrolling through a large list (i.e. 280+) is really chunky.
Once I have loaded all the files into the queue, I can still select-all, and set an output format relatively quickly. At this point, the actual conversion to generate AIFF files from the video clips runs faster than it took to load the list of files into AME!
I tried using a watch folder, but when I put the same 283 files (about 3.5 GB) of video clips into that folder, AME just sat and choked on a spinning cursor for about 15 minutes before I killed it.
A typical source clip would be a Quicktime file:
Linear PCM - 2-channel, 48khz
In the example that slowed me down, I was working with 283 similar MOV files, for a total of about 3.5gb of data.
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MP51.007F.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.39f11
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f11
Serial Number (system): H00345M8EUG
Serial Number (processor tray): J5031046RCZJA
Hardware UUID: 2908277C-D192-5B4C-8F96-58138A44B481
Running OS X 10.6.8
Any suggestions for fast workflows when converting large numbers of files?