hello there. a friend of mine brought me yesterday 4 cds in order to rip them. because most of the times eac takes about 20mins to rip and encode a cd, i decided to back up them using alcohol120% and then rip them using the virtual drive of alcohol.

i mounted the mdf files into the virtual drive. now is the problem. what settings should i enable in eac for the particular virtual drive?
should i check secure mode and enable accurate feature, audio caching, c2 errors or should i enable burst mode?

when i select detect read features it gives me all 3 options of the secure mode.

and what about the offset?

I if EAC detects any errors in secure mode you should buy a new hard disk

now that encoded the Dimmu Borgir - Deat Cult Armageddon cd in burst mode, it took about 10mins to rip and encode it. the extraction speed was extremely high. it began from 25X and reached 40X!!! at my quick listen of the encoded tracks, it all seems to be ok (the quality etc...).

i will rip and encode the same album with secure mode and post again.

secure mode: accurate stream feature enabled

the extraction speed was a little lower, varying from 15X to 26X. the extraction time was 11 and a half mins.

since the output files seem to be ok using burst mode, i think i'll stick to it when ripping from raw images.

Backing up audio CDs with Alcohol is not secure. If there were any errors on the CDs you "backed up" that way, Alcohol faithfully put them in the image, and later it's not possible for EAC to spot and correct them (since the errors are no longer physical). You should create the backup images (WAV + CUE) with EAC.

It is amusing how ppl get tangled in this quasi-technical terminology. So, you rip with EAC but back up with Alcohol120%?

In fact, you do exactly the same thing, just using different methods. As rutra explained, there is no point in "ripping" Alcohol's output with EAC because the rip has been performed already and the damage (if any) has been done.

Don't you mean the exact opposite? The ripping/reading errors are not something present on the disc physically and don't become "physical" until the rip is done and stored.

<edit: gramer amd speling :>

Whether the possible errors resulted from physical defects on the disc, or just error/misinterpretaion during the physical reading/extraction of the disc, the point remains the same. Errors which are now present in the image file can not be detected or corrected by EAC.

EAC must work in conjunction with the CD drive hardware, while reading from the actual audio disc, in order to perform it's magic.

Depends how you define errors. For me errors are altered data, these data are stored on physical media and an error occurs when you can't reliably read them. In this case that's due to physical damages of the disc (scratches etc.), and what's more important, thanks to that they can be detected and corrected. After storing an error in the image file it's no longer connected with the physical damage and can't be detected (nor corrected, as original data, even if damaged, is no longer there).
Maybe I should wrote "since the errors are no longer connected with physical damage which caused them" ...but lets not get philosophical

Edit: Oh, Cosmo has put it faster & shorter...

That's a bit of oversimplification. Read errors can occur even with undamaged media, and particularly easily wtih CDDA due to the much less robust error correction system.

Of course, that's beyond the point of this thread, as Cosmo noted.

On perfect media, with perfect reader, and in perfect environment (three physically impossible things), there would be no read errors (and no need for any error detection & correction at all). Nothing to discuss really.

guys, what are the cue sheets? i've been seeing them all over the discussion in ha and i've read some posts, but still i couldn't figure out what are they...

An audio cue sheet stores data regarding track and gap index positions within an image file, or of separately ripped tracks. It tells the burning software how to recreate the exact layout of the CD (...and can also be utilized for playback by certain players). EAC writes different types of cue sheets specific to how the files were extracted.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_CUE_Sheets
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Gap_settings