Hey all i was hoping u could help me out.
I'm finding that for Eac, in secure mode it rips the first track of the cd at about 8-9x, but the following tracks are always much much much slower (2.5x). This was why i thought about creating an exact image of the cd, mounting it with daemon tools and use Eac on that. It is heaps faster,but im worried about if quality drops. Any one have any knowledge on this topic, or whats causing my (liteon) cd drive to slow down? Btw what is generally a good speed achievable for eac in secure mode?

Thanks
Ed

1) with liteon drive you must disable "allow speed reduction." This should keep the drive from slowing down when it sync's tracks.

2) if you create an image and then rip that with EAC, you are only ripping the unsecure image. It's no different than using burst mode.

@ dreamliner:
Thanks heaps for ur reply.
Disc doesnt slow down between tracks yay! btw, how did you find out that liteon drives have this problem?

At least now there is no need to make a cd image

Cheers
Ed

I hope you realized that ripping into an image and running EAC on that image would be a pointless execise on a massive scale.... And that is an understatement!

Unless you use EAC merely as a tool to spit a image into tracks and call an encoder of your choice. One thing is sure EAC will not be able to improve the quality of your rip once you already ripped it (probably with some inferior method)

Triza

Edited: Added some clarifications.

I have a liteon drive myself and had to experiment to figure this out. EAC's techniques interfere's Liteon's built in scheme.

@ triza:
I thought maybe using alcohol 120%, which produces one to one copies of a disc, would be similar to EAC. But now I have no need to because without "allow speed reduction" the ripping speed is acceptable.

Thanks for ur help
Ed

The problem is that an "exact copy" is not used the same way when talking about game cds and audio cds.

Game cds usually have a copy-protection that relies on intentional errors on the cd. If you let your drive try to correct them the copy-protection can tell and you can't play the game. That is why programs like alchohol try to preserve these errors thus making an "exact copy".

With audio cds that is (usually?) not the case. There you WANT to correct the errors because they should not be there and are most likely caused by damage to the cd. It is therefore crucial that you try to correct them the right way. Getting the correct data as it was intented with the errors corrected it what EAC means by "exact copy".

You can however not go from a ripped alchohol image to a secure rip since EAC has no way to correct the errors from the image. On a cd it will read it several times to get the correct result but the image will always return the same data so you will get the wrong info that was originally ripped with alchohol.

Maybe this last post could be added to a sticky or wiki, because it is a good and short explanation for those who have the idea to rip to an image before ripping with EAC.

This is indeed a good advice : how can you get an exact image without using EAC in the first place ?

But the explanation is at best inaccurate. Any CD burning software (like Nero, EasyCD Creator, etc) let you choose between correcting errors or not when you copy a CD ROM.
Programs like Alcohol or CloneCD are much more advanced. Techniques used to protect CD ROMs don't use intentional errors, but for example weak sectors (SafeDisc 2 : sectors of data that most burners can't write because of a weakness in their specifications), or twin sectors (MediaClock ? : two sectors on the groove have the same adress, but contain different data).