Here's my current ripping setup:

EAC 0.95 pre-beta 5
Adaptec ASPI 4.60 installed (using external ASPI in EAC)
Plextor PX-W2410A CD-RW drive
XP Pro / SP1, all updates
Athlon XP 2600, 512MB DDR266, SiS 735 chipset

I've noticed this recently, maybe it was even happening with pre-beta 4, but I can't be 100% sure about this. Basically what is happening is that extraction speed slows down to about half speed after ripping several CD's. I'm ripping in secure mode, with drive cache and C2 enabled in EAC config. Normally, I get ripping speeds between 7x and 15x, with average speed close to 8x (for entire CD). After ripping a few CD's, all of a sudden my average extraction speed drops to something near 3.5x to 4x. Here's the kicker... if I close and re-start EAC and re-rip the SAME CD without removing the disc from the drive, extraction speed is back to normal (avg. 8x or so). Normally, I am keeping EAC running all the time and rip several CD's in a ripping session. Now, I have to watch the extraction speed and cancel if it's low, then re-start EAC. Just a minor annoyance, but still...

I haven't noticed any audible problems in the ripped tracks when it extracts at normal or slow speed.

Any ideas?

Edit: I'd post this on the official EAC forum, but the registration and much of the forum is in German... I don't speak, write or understand German. Although my family originally came from the Black Forest region of Germany, that was about 200 years ago...

This is strange!! Never happened to me before. Never heard of something like this before.

I agree, and it's definitely repeatable. Sometimes even the first CD has slow extraction speed.

I may try to drop the 0.95pb4 exe in the EAC folder and try that, to see if it's a new problem or not.

I'm interested in understanding this more, as well.
I don't recall reading or seeing anything like this. I'm curious to see the results before I guess or assume anything.
I could swear when I registered over a year ago more of the site was in English .. maybe not. This may help: Link to EAC Forum (Digital Inn) Registration page translated by WorldLingo to English

tec

I have seen the opposite-the first cd will rip at 3-3.5x using settings like you describe, then the 2nd or third will rip at 7-10X. The first one always seems to be the slowest rip. I am using a no name dvd drive for ripping, which may be the problem.

Yeah, this has been a problem for a LONG time. It has been doing this to me for years with EAC. I have read a lot about it, but I never read about a definitive fix for the problem. Some of the work arounds are to disable the option to have EAC slow down when it encounters errors, but I don't know of anything that totally fixes the issue. Basically, some drives, once they slow down, won't speed back up again until you restart the program. I would search the EAC messageboard and see what you can find, I haven't looked into it in a while.

I'm got a problem that might be similar.

My drive, a Memorex DVDMaxx 1648, spins up at full speed when EAC is started (EAC initializes the drive). After a short time (something like 10 seconds), it speeds down a little, then again, every few seconds, it spins down until it stops.

Now the trick is that every track ripped in a CD starts at the speed at which the drive was spinning when the rip began, until it is too fast for a correct reading. Example, I start EAC, the drive spins at full speed. It slows down when I set the directory in which I rip, then the rip begins at this medium speed.

Testing Track 1
Medium speed. Then full speed.

Reading track 1
Back to medium speed, then full speed.

...

Testing track 5
Medium speed, but doesn't switch to full speed, as the reading speed reaches 25x and the error rate is considered too high by the firmware to allow spin up

...

Testing track 12
Medium speed, then one row of error correction, and low speed
Reading track 12
Back to medium speed, then low speed, but without error correction.

That's how my drive behaves.

A more annoying behaviour is that it is unable to change the speed without risking introducing errors. So if I start ripping from a very low speed, after it has stopped, then as soon as it tries to spin up, error correction occurs, and it falls down to very low speed. I have to close EAC, re open it, then be fast enough to launch the ripping while the drive is still at full speed. Then it rips all the CD from 16 to 34x without problem. Past 34x (in testing) or 32x (in reading), the drive can't read without errors and it slows down. The difference between the testing speed and the reading speed must be caused by the IDE port being busy writing on the hard drive.

Allowing speed reduction or not have no effect, if I remember well. In this case it is not EAC that detects the error and tells the drive to slow down, but the drive firmware that limits the maximum speed on the fly.

Yep, I have also seen this today. It's getting pretty late here, so I'm not going to play with it any more. Probably rip some more tomorrow, I'll post back here if I discover anything.

I use a tool called Nero Drive Speed to spin-up the drive before extraction. It is freely available at CDSpeed2000 site. It lets you set the desired speed and idle-time after the drive will spin-down. I also use it to slow-down the drive, for example when I play some games I don't want the drive to spin at maximum speed, so I set it to the lowest possible (less noise and longer life for CDs and drives).

The more I think about it, this has also happened using PlexTools, so it might be the drive/BIOS itself that is doing this. Using DAE in PlexTools, I would sometimes notice slow extraction speeds. I would check the "drive settings" in PlexTools, and find the drive set to 4x clv mode, instead of the normal 32-40x cav mode. It seems to do this after inserting a disc. Maybe the drive checks something when a disc is inserted and is trying to set the fastest possible "safe" speed?

I'm, pretty sure it's not directly related to PlexTools, because I only load it when I use it, it's not resident when I'm using EAC, so I don' think it's a PlexTools issue.

I'm really surprised if this is an issue with this model, since it was a quite popular model. I am using the latest BIOS, 1.04.

rutra80: PlexTools also has similar speed and spindown settings, and I have Nero installed (which includes the tool you mentioned), so I may experiment with them.

Edit: spelling

When I used to use EAC it would fluctuate in speed, e.g.; slow, fast, etc. I don't know if it depends on the disc, such as the amount of scratches or difficultly in extracting the audio, or if it is a hardware related issue such as the drive getting got.

One thing that was interesting when testing my two DVD drives on my new system with Feurio it stated that my TEAC DV-W58E 8X DVD+RW Drive could have speeds set, however the JLMS XJ-HD166 DVD Drive by Liteon couldn't have speeds set. After properly configuring EAC for the drives it was most interesting that the JLMS drive which couldn't have the speed set had alot of audible errors after extraction, even though EAC said some tracks were ripped 99% and 100% in quality, and even though EAC stated it was the best drive in the system to use for DAE.

I have noticed the same behavior with PlexTools and my PX-708A.

I had a problem similar to the ones stated in this thread. I would rip a couple albums at around 12x and then I'd pop in the next album and it would read really slow, around 3.0x and all albums after that would read at that speed. I'd have to re-start EAC to get the same albums to read at 12x or so. It never mattered what album it was, because once restarted, EAC would read at max speed again. After a couple of albums ripped, it would then reduce speed to around 3.0x again. Very frustrating. I fixed this problem by not having my drive set for allowed speed reduction. It seems that once EAC detected an error and reduced the drive speed to extract slower; my drive was never able to speed up after it got through that passage, even through albums following. I've never had this problem after I unchecked "allow speed reduction during extraction." My rips have been more accurate ever since and I've never had a speed problem.

This is from the Coaster Factory guide to setting drive options. It seems the issue is drive related and known...



So turning this option off seems to be the fix. I hope that we all get the results ChangFest did.

I prefer not to turn this option off because I want the drive to slow down when it encounters errors. Another possibility is to use a free utility like Nero DriveSpeed to spin up the drive when it gets "stuck" in first gear.

I have that option turned off, and I still have the problem, so I don't think that is a complete fix. My drive is a Plextor PX-708A.

I'm not so sure it's a good idea to manually speed the drive up DURING the extraction using Drive Speed (or similar app), wouldn't that likely introduce errors? Not sure how EAC would respond to that. That said, I haven't attempted it.

Re: the comments about the drive slowing down on read errors but then staying there, this has happened even on pristine CD's with absolutely no scratches. And, EAC doesn't always show error correction when this happens. I can understand the drive slowing down when read errors are detected, but when there are no errors, it still seems to happen.

Actually, I haven't seen this as much lately, for some reason, even though nothing has been changed. I ripped about 30 cd's last weekend, and it happened maybe twice. But it would be nice if someone could dig deep into this to find out why it's happening. Seems to be not directly related to a particular drive or ripping program, since I have seen it in both PlexTools and EAC, and people have reported this in other drives than Plextor.

When I mentioned the DriveSpeed idea I wasn't suggesting using it during extraction. I guess I didn't make myself clear.

The problem I had with EAC was that it would slow down the drive (PX-W1610) during extraction and the drive would get "stuck" at the lower speed on subsequent discs. Even after restarting EAC, the drive wouldn't resume normal operation until after a reboot. To me this indicated that the firmware was refusing to accept a higher speed for some reason.

I used DriveSpeed to snap the drive out of its low-speed fixation as an alternative to rebooting. I never ran DriveSpeed and EAC at the same time.

I got a problem with lame. I configured EAC as described in the coaster factory and I've ripped 100 cd's at good speed: +/- 10x. The problkem is now that EAC reads a little bit slower, around 8x, but lame is encoding at 3x.
So when EAC is done ripping there are still one a 15 number cd about ten compressions left.

It also seems EAC is slowing down way more often because of possible errors.

I've tried some things and this is the problem. When EAC is reading tracks and lame is at the same time compressing lame has a speed of 3x. If I only let EAC read one track and EAC finishes reading it, lame will get a speed of 12x, cause EAC isn't doing anything. If I want to get the rip speed I used to get I have to rip on track at a time. This is off course time consuming beacause EAC won't read a track while lame is encoding. This problem just started this morning. Anybody got some ideas on this problem.

Thanks

Is there a reason you need the encoded tracks right away? If not, you should open up the compression queue and make all encoding tasks sleep. Then EAC will rip all the tracks and put them in the queue. When you are done ripping the album (or dozens of albums) open up the queue and uncheck the sleep box and let the encoder take over.

I usually rip lots of albums. Then when I know I'm going to be away from the computer, I let the encoder chomp on the tracks I've ripped.

Ok, a good solution, but if you don't have the same problem as I do why don't you read and encode at the same time. When EAC is finished lame will also be finished, maybe exept for one or two songs. Way faster. When EAC is done you can put in another cd and edit whatever you want to dit on the tags and when you';re done with this, lame will also be ready.

I'll give it a try though. Thanks.

Sir_Fresh,

Could it be that DMA is disabled for your CD-Rom drive? Ripping a CD isn't really CPU intensive....

What do you mean.
I have a DVD-rom.

I've ripped some cd's with my DVD writer and lame is going at normal speed (12x). The only problem is that the writer is slower in reading, around 5x, and not able of retrieving C2 error information.

So when I use another drive everything is ok, so the settings and my computer are 'fine', but my DVD drive is just not working ok. What could be wrong with it. I haven't changed any options in EAC and didn't change the ASPI.



How do you do this exactly.

I don't use LAME I use flac. And since I'm archiving my CDs while I work I don't want the encoder to eat all of my system resources, slowing down all the other multi-tasking that I'm doing.

Hit Ctrl-Q (or go to the Tools menu and choose Compression Queue Control Center)
Check the check-box "Make all compression tasks sleep"
Hit OK
Rip away (as many CDs as you'd like)

When you are ready for the encoder to do it's stuff...
Hit Ctrl-Q
Un-check the box
Hit OK

FYI, while you are ripping you will see a note at the bottom of EAC that says...
"# Compression tasks left"

(I'm using pre-beta 5 - the latest edition.)

How do you do this? When I open DriveSpeed it shows the drive is currently at 48x and the only options I have in the drop-down are 48x and maximum. What do you do? Just open the app and close it? Do you keep it running all the time? How do you apply the changes you make?