The writeup (on their website) looks very impressive indeed.

My biggest reluctance to switch from EAC is because I have spent literally dozens of hours learning it and configuring it and making it do what I want. Nobody could claim that EAC's user interface is all that simple or intuitive!

Nonetheless, I have downloaded the trial dbpoweramp and if it works anything like as well as you (and their website) suggest, it will be my new ripper. As with EAC, I'll continue to use LAME as the encoder, and Nero has done well for me as far as burning the CDs, so I'll stay with that. Unless you can tell me of some obvious advantages to dbpoweramp's burner, that is...

I would still like to know, however, just what happened in my computer to suddenly make EAC stop working after all these months...

tanstaafl.

EDIT: Andy, you are my hero! I urge anybody who is still using EAC to take a look at the dbpoweramp suite. The user interface is far less intimidating, and nearly as powerful as EAC's. (I think EAC is a bit more versatile about setting up the tag information, but dbpoweramp's file-naming conventions are powerful enough that all I need to do is use MP3 Tag Studio to "Tag from Filename" and I'm done.) The speed was impressive, two and a half minutes to rip and encode (with LAME, VBR, ~170 KBPS) a 19 track, 73 minute CD, guaranteed (by Accurate Rip) error free and with the best file/tag info (compiled/compared from four different databases) I have ever had. The final track was ripping and simultaneously encoding at 48x listening speed.

Now, if only it weren't so expensive... I mean, twenty-four whole dollars to buy it ($36 if I get the top of the line with features I don't need like the CD burner, multiple batch processing, a bunch of codecs I don't use, etc.) but if I cut back to five meals per week for a while maybe I can afford it.

Thanks, Andy, for pointing this one out to me.

tanstaafl.