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Topic: EAC is painfully slow (Read 4105 times) previous topic - next topic
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EAC is painfully slow

I'm in the midst of ripping my entire CD collection losslessly, so I really need to get the best possible rip speed to avoid spending months on this.  I've used EAC for years and been very happy with it.  However, on my work PC it is horribly slow.  Any suggestions for ways to fix this, or is it my CD drive?

The drive is "TSSTcorpCDRWDVD TS-H493A."  It came with the Dell tower.  Since this is an office, I can't just swap it out, though I'd consider bringing in an external drive if it might be faster.  The drive allegedly has a max read speed of 48X, but my experience with EAC is way less than that: secure mode gives me a rip speed of usually 3X or so, sometimes less; even burst mode (when I use this I do test & copy) is maxing out under 16X, and more often hovers around 12 or less.  In fact as I write this I'm doing a test & copy and it's sitting at about 7X, on a pristine CD.  Playing with some of the drive config options hasn't really altered the speed from what I can tell.  But I don't know EAC that well - in the past I've mostly used it with whatever options it detected for my drive, and in the default secure mode.  This is fine at home, but I do 2/3 of my ripping at the office while I work, and it's taking far too long.

EAC is painfully slow

Reply #1
Have you tried dBpoweramp for a comparison? Posting a log file (just the header) from EAC might also help identify if it's a problem with your settings.
daefeatures.co.uk

EAC is painfully slow

Reply #2
Have you tried dBpoweramp for a comparison? Posting a log file (just the header) from EAC might also help identify if it's a problem with your settings.


Not too familiar with dBpoweramp.  It can only be used as a trial version unless paid for, correct?

Here's my EAC log:

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 1 from 15. November 2010

EAC extraction logfile from 4. February 2011, 12:14

Used drive  : TSSTcorpCDRWDVD TS-H493A  Adapter: 1  ID: 0

Read mode : Burst

Read offset correction                      : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out          : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks  : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations      : No
Used interface                              : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Gap handling                                : Not detected, thus appended to previous track

Used output format : Internal WAV Routines
Sample format      : 44.100 Hz; 16 Bit; Stereo

EAC is painfully slow

Reply #3
Haha, you're lucky: I'm getting 1.3x in secure mode...

EAC is painfully slow

Reply #4
dalecooper, I've had similar results with my Dell at work, as well (hmm...).

It's an older model (about 4 years old) and has a Samsung DVD-ROM drive.  To give some quick numbers, I grabbed a clean 45 minute CD (Bonobo's "Animal Magic", for the record), and did a few rips, all to WAV.

With iTunes, it started at around 9x on the first track and ended up around 25x on the last track - not blazing, but not too bad.

Quit iTunes, open EAC (0.99pb3, FWIW...and my EAC log is essentially identical to yours, just a difference in the read offset).

With EAC in burst mode (which I also normally use with test & copy), it started around 6x and ended around 13x.

Switch to a ~6 year old Lite-On CD drive in a no-name generic USB 2.0 enclosure, and iTunes and EAC were identical: 15x at the start, 37x at the end.

These sort of differences have been reported before, and I can't remember if there was ever a consistent reason, but an external drive has the potential to give you substantially better speeds if you're stuck with that particular internal drive (although even then, the drive mechanism may still be the weak link, but at least you could try different ones without risking the wrath of the IT department  ).
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."

 

EAC is painfully slow

Reply #6
Might be that your drive reverted to PIO mode - I posted a similar problem a while back, see this thread:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=82607


Interesting.  In my device manager it looks like primary and secondary IDE are set to Ultra DMA Mode 5 and Ultra DMA Mode 2 respectively.  However, I have a second listing for both primary and secondary which says transfer mode is "DMA if available" and current mode is "Not Applicable."  I wonder what that's about..?

EAC is painfully slow

Reply #7
Nothing's plugged in.

Given that it's a corporate Dell machine, you very likely have just one hard drive (UDMA 5) and the one DVD drive (UDMA 2), with the hard drive on the primary controller and the DVD drive on the secondary.
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."

EAC is painfully slow

Reply #8
When drives are configured as caching and not capable of providing C2 pointers, EAC will request ~3MB of data from the drive for every 1MB that is kept.

If this is too inefficient for you then use a non-caching drive that provides C2 pointers, burst mode or some other ripping program.