I have run into a problem ripping some audiobook CDs with EAC.

I am pretty sure the problem is not EAC, but rather a limitation of my CD burner.

The burner is a "Philips SPD2513P SCSI CdRom Device", and apparently it will not read the final two or three tracks on any of the audiobook CDs. These CDs follow the unhappy but unfortunately all too common practice of splitting the CD into anywhere from 15 to 25 short tracks, some of them as little as a minute or so in duration. EAC says that the CD I am working with at the moment is 16 tracks, 1:06:17 in duration at 669.13 MB, and will compress down to 46.61 MB. (Yes, I know, that is a lot of compression (14:1) but this is an audiobook with very limited dynamic range so it compresses to a higher degree than might otherwise be expected.)

EAC compresses at about 20-21x speed until it hits the last three tracks, at which point progress ceases. Eventually it errors out.

The reason I think it is not an EAC problem is that Windows Media Player also will not play these tracks. It loads them and tries to play them, but just stutters along in fits and starts.

I think what this process is trying to tell me is that I need a better CD/DVD burner. The Philips burner is brand new, perhaps 10 hours of usage on it.

So, now the questions.

1) Do I need a different/better burner, or am I overlooking something obvious?

2) What CD/DVD burner will run happily with EAC and Windows Vista?

Question 2 is of particular importance to me. My last three burners (the Philips I have now, a brand new Lite-On before that, and a used and well-tested Samsung before that) all gave unsatisfactory performance with EAC, requiring me to turn off all error correction (i.e., secure mode) features to get any speed higher than 0.4x ripping speed. The burner I had before those was a five year old Lite-On CD only (no DVD) that consistently gave me 24x burning speed while in secure mode.

What should I do now?

tanstaafl.