I have one CD that my Plextor UltraPlex40Max (SCSI) cannot rip from. It cannot be ripped with my Yamaha 4x4x24 burner either. Both of these drives can "play" the CDDA without a problem though. The only drive I have around here that has been able to rip the disc is a very cheap 40x Toshiba. It only rips at a true 1x though.

The problem with ripping slowing down to a crawl or slowing down at all, occurs on a few of my discs as well. Sometimes at the end of really long discs (nearing 80 minutes) or sometimes somewhere in the middle tracks. I'm pretty certain it has something to do with the way the discs have been mastered. On some of them you can see visible gaps between the tracks on the surface of the disc.

If you're using Audiograbber and ANY track starts to slow down below the value ripped on the previous track, then you will have to adjust your rip settings. Any track this happens to will have pops and otehr corruption. I have found that lowering the DAE speed to 8x works for some tracks, while others need a setting of 1x. On the Plex40, setting to 1x in Audiograbber will do a real 4x DAE. This has worked perfectly for all problem tracks except the one disc I mentioned.

The disc in case anyone can also verify, is Ministry's "The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste."

About the only other ripping application that I would ever consider above Audiograbber (for quality) is EAC (Exact Audio Copy). It's much slower than Audiograbber though because of its redundancy. With a good SCSI Plextor drive (there's nothing better for DAE) - AG does work very well. And its interface is fairly friendly, easy to navigate and convenient for ripping mass quantities. :) (I've done all 450 of my current CDs already - encoded with LAME 3.9alpha)