i've had a problem with this drive since i first got it.. it has always produced small (but audibly noticable) defects in the final 1-2 seconds of most of the tracks it rips. it's basically just a small skip in the sound, but sometimes it can contain a burst of audio from elsewhere in the track (usually from 10 seconds or fewer before the glitch)..

this hasn't been a problem before now because i had a DVD-rom which ripped perfectly, but i got a new 160gb HD for xmas and had to remove something from my IDE interface to make room for it. it was either the DVDrom, the HD which contains my OS and most of my software, or the HD which contains all of my music-making parephenalia.. the decision was fairly easy..

i've tried all sorts of tweaking, following offset guides in the FAQ, etc.. every time i check the offset on a given CD, it's the same, but it's never the same for two different CDs.. so i looked up my drive on a list i found via some googling.. the closest i could find is RW8432 which is a rebadged Plextor PW8432T or some such.. i tried using the recommended offset values for that drive and nothing changed (that i could tell).. i looked at some of the other values for the Plextor drive and found that they did not match my RW8438E specs (e.g. the chart said the drive supported Read Command D8, whereas EAC detects it as MMC1..) so it doesn't seem to be the right drive.. oy.

my questions: should i even be bothering with offset? is there a way to make my drive stop having sync errors? i tried ripping at a reduced speed (2x), and it just seemed to take longer to produce the sync errors.. :/

any help greatly appreciated

peace,
bogsnarth

No idea.

The offset shouldn't have anything to do with it. Enabled "Overread into lead-in/out" combined with a corrected read offset can for some drives (those which don't support overreading) lead to a (was it sync?) error, but only for either one track per CD (mostly the last, sometimes the first)

1) update firmware for the cdrw drive

if that doesn't work...

2) Invest $20-30 for a PCI ATA card.