(phew, I come here for a quick question about EAC only to find all this Karma Kraziness. Cool.)

I'm working on reripping a handfull of CDs which didn't rip correctly during my year 2000 rippings (with AudioCatalyst and EZCD+L3ENC). Taking tips from here, I'm using EAC with the latest LAME. But I want to make sure I get it right this time, so I have some questions.

First off, I'm ripping on an Athlon 1.4 with a sad copy of Win98 on it. My 40x LG Electronics CD Rom drive is ripping pristeen CDs at like 0.7x with NO incidents of error correction. Why is it running so slow? Can I get it back to ripping at 8x like I could with Audio Catylist?

Funny, because my P166 running Windows 2000 is using its 32x Plextor CDR drive to rip at like 2x. Why the speed difference?

An old external 12x SCSI 1 CDRom drive on my P166 used to rip CDs like a friggin race car. Should I give that a try to speed things up? Or, should I stick with my newer Plextor drive?

Thanks.

Check the task bar (bottom of screen) and ensure that windows hasn't thoughtfully started up the CD-Player applet when you inserted the disc.. it was doing that to me just yesterday.

-ml

CD-ROM drives have data read speads and audio read speeds. Your LG is a 40x - that's the data rating. It's possible the audio rating is 8x, based on what you've mentioned. Anyway...

In my experience, EAC, when set up to rip CDs and make sure there are no errors, does not rip quickly. My recently built Athlon 2500+ machine encodes very quickly, but the ripping leaves a little to be desired. This is done on a Lite-On DVD drive, and I typically get rip speeds of 3-7x.

All that said, it depends on how you have EAC set up, and then it depends on how good your particular drive may be for ripping audio. If you have some other drives lying around, you may want to try them out and see if you get quicker rips out of them. But double-check your EAC settings before you start swapping drives.

Thanks for the tips everyone. No, the evil Windows CD Player is not starting up, thankfully. But yes, my drive might just be bad at ripping audio. After about 10 hours of ripping, I've found my read speeds go up to 1.5x on the LG and 3x on the Plextor. Yeah, I'll try some other drives and see how it works out. Thanks again.

IIRC EAC is very suseptable to which ASPI drivers you are using.

On my system I had similar (but less extreme) speed reduction when I reloaded windows. Got the Adaptec ASPI drivers (free download from Adaptec site) and now I'm up to about 8X ripping on a 40 speed drive, Athlon XP1900.

There are also some settings in EAC which can be tweeked but I can't recall what they are at present.

I actually set mine up by using a utility downloaded from Chris Myden's website ( www.chrismyden.com/nuke/modules.php?op=modload&name=Elite_DAE&file=painless ) which sets EAC up in a very good state of tune with no thinking required

Good luck, Sim

Is there a setting in EAC to rip a CD with tracks as one long continuous WAV file instead of the individual tracks??

I haven't got it installed on this PC, so I can't check, but I believe what you're after is:

Action menu -> Copy image and create cue sheet

Is there a setting in EAC to rip a CD with tracks as one long continuous WAV file instead of the individual tracks?

Dunno about EAC specifically, but you could check and see if the method here in the empeg FAQ works:

Rip your CD as one huge single track (usually done by selecting only the last track then editing the track start time in the ripper software).

I'd be curious if that works in EAC. In some other rippers I've seen, you have to get the "properties" of the track to edit its start time.

I think you want Action>Copy Range>Uncompressed...

At least I think that's how I have done it in EAC. You can create a cue file separately with Action>Create Cue Sheet> Single Wave File.

Yep that did it. Thanks!