I have been doing searches and reading posts on ripping and extracting MP3's since I ordered my empegs. I even bought a Plextor UltraPlex 40 Wide (Already had a wide SCSI card). My question is, what are the best settings for this drive under EAC? If I use the native Win32 interface I can rip at about 12-16X. If I use the ASAPI interface I get 17-24X rips. And there are a bunch of settings in the Drive options and Extraction option that I don't have a clue how to set. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

- Neil

empeg MkIIa X 2

There's some good info at R3mix. Check out the EAC tutorial in the ripping section.

heh, yah the -r3mix setting RULES for sound quality.

Thanks for the tip on R3mix. I found a FAQ that walked me through the settings on EAC.

- Neil

I had high hopes for EAC/Lame and got some great sounding MP3s using the --r3mix settings.
Only problems came with Pink Floyd.... It encoded "Signs of Life" at a pathetic 32K and produced nothing but silence. Not very useful.
Guess that is best suited to 192 or 256K CBR instead.

I've had problems with EAC/LAME encoding tracks at 32K with silence - turns out it has to do with the "Drive Options" that are set in the "EAC" menu. Depending on your hardware, these settings control how the music is ripped from the CD. I've fixed three systems that don't rip properly by messing with these settings (all three had different settings, you'll need to see what works best on your HW).

Yeah, i've had two machines do the same thing, but fixed it by running the hardware analysis thingamabob a few times until it worked. My friends seems to have reverted on it's own though, and is now doing the 32k thing again...

I figured it
EAC does not correctly detect the read command for the drive and you have to manually select it.
"Signs of Life" now sounds as good as CD.

Cool. =]

Yeah, it seems really buggy about the whole drive detection thing. I get different settings randomly every time i detect my drive. I just tried them all until it worked.

> I get different settings randomly every time i detect my
> drive. I just tried them all until it worked

...me too. Luckily the first detection yielded something that worked, although I suspect it may not yet be ideal for my particular drive. That is, I have no idea if there are still errors that I am unable to hear.

As a side note, I've decided to do some 192kbps VBR rips after reading this thread and now notice that a lot of tracks that I had formerly encoded at 256kbps CBR have a TON of frames at 256-320kbps, where I suspect I was really losing data at my former encoding. Live recordings especially -- the sea of screams and squeals really eats bandwidth.