This just started popping up.

I use to be able to rip a CD with EAC and it would sound great. Now, every so often (and getting more frequent), EAC rips a CD that just sounds miserable. The .wav files have a strange God-awful pulsing sound to them.

What makes this weird is that it is unpredictable. I ripped a CD and it sounded great, so I went ahead and encoded it then got rid of the source. While listening to it, I realized it really, really needed to be encoded gapless. After reading up on gapless, and getting the .AUT script from another thread, I ripped the CD again. This time, the songs have the pulsing artifact. It seems to happen at the end of the CD.

Has anybody seen this before, or able to make any suggestions?

Thanks.

EAC implements some extracting modes. One of the best (but slower) modes is the secured mode. In the past I never used fast/burst mode with my CD-player, which was known having some little DAC hick-ups. I've a pioneer and plextor now, which I trust with burst mode.

So:
Use secure mode and BTW: are the CD's clean?

Good luck,

EiSl

I believe the CDs are clean, but I will verify that when I get home (and re-rip this CD). I've been using the default, but I will also check out Secure mode. I'm also using a Plextor.

Thanks for the thoughts, I'll check them out.

Rip in Secure mode and disable C2. Even Plextors have had problems with C2. Do not trust EAC's "auto feaure test". It will show that nearly all drives support C2 error correction, but very few do. Also put a check next to "Drive caches audio data". This will clear out the cache.

EAC > Drive Settings

.AUT script

can you point me to the AUT file?

I grabbed it from your post.

That script rocked. Thank you for posting it.

ah okay
long time back....glad it worked

I just wanted to post to agree and amplify your remarks about ripping in secure mode and disabling C2 and the caching option in EAC.
Ok, you get piss poor speeds compared normal settings but I believe quality is more important than speed.
An example of how long it can take is when I ripped a Madness CD I have here; it took over 4 hours. There are scratches all over the top & bottom of the disc but it plays perfectly on the empeg now (it didn't before). I also have other (apparently) flawless CDs that took a while to rip this way compared to more relaxed methods. Each time (and for no apparent reason) I noticed the error dot incrementing in EAC but in the end there were no errors logged by EAC for the final rip. Presumably through persistance it managed to correct them all - I'm not going back but I would assume these ripped with errors beforehand and I wasn't paying full attention.

I followed those settings, and it took over 6 hours to do 4 tracks. I switched over to my IDE CD-ROM, re-ripped the CD using your settings, and it ripped them at ~3x and they sound awesome.

Thanks for the help.

I also recommend to disable any drive's C2 support. However, EACs detection of a drive caching audio seem to be quite accurate (at least it was on my drives), and setting the mark for "drive caches audio" makes ripping _a lot_ slower, so it should only be switched on when the drive actually caches audio (or you have reason to believe it does, such as bad rips even in secure mode). Most drives do not cache audio.
This is also the recommondation I got from Andre (author of EAC) during a local meet (I live in the same town as he does). According to him, many drives report they support C2 error reporting and actually do so in some cases, but C2 error detection is quite inaccurate to say the least. Enabling it is only recommended for people who want to rip at maximum speed and still want at least _some_ sort of error detection. In other words: C2 should only be used in Burst mode, but not in secure mode. He was once thinking about automatically disabling C2 in secure mode, but decided not to as he wanted to let the user choose.

cu,
sven

I finally got a chance to listen to those CDs on the empeg that I was having problems with. Those options in EAC and the AUT script worked out great! There are no artifacts in any of the tracks at all, and gapless rocks.

Thanks for all the help everybody.

If anyone was wondering how to do "--alt-presets" in LAME, here is how. I actually use "--alt-preset standard" rather than extreme. (see pic)

The "error meter" in EAC is the error correction in action. If the meter never makes it to the 5th line of red, then the error was correctable. If any of you are getting CD's that are too scratched, first try another drive (some are better at reading scratched CD's than others) and if that doesn't work, use a "Skip Dr." to actually buff the scratches out of the CD (like a buffing wheel can remove scratches from a car). The Skip Dr. really deserves it's own thread to be honest. I have saved nearly 50 CD's with my Skip Dr. It removes a super thin layer of plastic each time you use it to get past the scratches. Google it.

EAC > Compression Settings