Alright, this is my first post here, but this seems like a group of like-minded people. I've found other drive speed related threads, but they all seem to be about the drive running too slowly. I have the opposite problem, when I try to listen to audio CDs, the drive spins up to 40X and stays there. Since I use my computer as my primary CD player, (I like the DAC in my soundcard,) this gets to be a nuisance because it adds loads of background noise. Sounds like I'm trying to listen to music at the airport or something.
At the moment, I'm using Nero's handy DriveSpeed application to cut it down to 10X, which makes for near-silent playback. But I also recently started using foobar2000, which overrides Nero at each track change and ramps it back up to 40X. Needless to say, it's a bit of a pain in the ass having to go in and limit the drive speed for each song. The reason I like foobar so much is that it allows me to upsample my CDs to 96khz, and they sound MUCH better than through either WMP or winamp. (Better instrument separation, tighter bass, clearer high end, all-round an improved listening experience.) So I'd like to keep using it, but if I have to deal with this drive issue, I'm going to have to give it up. Does anyone know of a better program for drive speed limiting, or a way to change foobar?
(Side note: the reason I stopped using winamp (which didn't have odd desires to increase my drive speed) is because my drive seems to have problems with digital audio extraction, and that resulted in lots of crackling when I played CDs with winamp. WMP has an error correction feature that took care of the problem, but also resulted in the increased drive speed. Nero worked well with WMP, but foobar keeps messing with it.)