Hi, I wanted to start burning CDs in flac.

But I could never get EAC to work. (XP sp 3). i've looked at the various tutorials and fiddled around with a few things.

Almost an hour had gone by without finishing one CD. (and I have a fast AMD processor).

I found the number of options unbelievable.

The preliminary CD test shows that I had passed two of the three tests.

accurate stream...yes
drive caches audio data....yes
capable of retrieving c2 info...no

but every time I try I get all these sync errors, and everything is just too slow.

Really, this shouldn't be rocket science.

I have no problems burning mp3s with windows media player. I'm thinking of using 320 bps mp3 for my archiving rip..even though that would be a pain.

Does anyone know of a better and more user friendly tool? I downloaded flac frontend, but apparently it has no cd rip capability. Would ripping as wav first in windows media player and then encoding in flac save time or at least finish the job?

And how long is a reasonable time for a flac encode to take for a single cd?

try dbpoweramp. Many folks on this forum use either EAC or dbpoweramp for secure ripping, and dbpoweramp is often thought of as the more user friendly....

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

These are not pass/fail tests. In particular, "drive caches audio data....yes" is actually undesirable.

actually I just tried free rip and found it worked very well. it's freeware, but I'm probably going to pay for the premium version.

it is super fast.

http://www.freerip.com/features.php

Considering your decision, I have to wonder why you even bothered with EAC in the first place.

Please read on what "AccurateRip" is, before going with a tool other than EAC or dbPoweramp. Especially if you are going to purchase Freerip over dbPoweramp, you need to understand AccurateRip to make an informed purchasing decision.

http://www.accuraterip.com/

Please keep in mind that fast =! good necessarily. The reason some programs read the CDs faster can be because they dont error check the CDs properly. If I were you and you find EAC to finicky to work with Id try out dbpoweramp as pointed out previously. If you do, youll get good results as well as proper rips (most likely).

Not everyone is interested in secure ripping, I guess.

To further help with your understanding, I'd like to provide help with each of these 5 lines.

1. What do you mean by "wanted to start burning CD's in FLAC"? Do you want to burn data CD's that contain FLAC files, do you want to create audio CD's from FLAC files, do you want to create FLAC files from audio CD rips, etc.?

2. Sync errors will most often point to a CD scratched beyond all ability of EAC to read all information from the disc. How many CD's have you tried with EAC?

3. Burning MP3's with WMP - please see my questions to #1. Also, 320kbps is rarely recommended - one of the -V quality settings in LAME serves most peoples quality needs/wants far more efficiently. What are your planned uses of 320kbps MP3's? Perhaps we can recommend something better.

4. dbPoweramp was already recommended. EAC and dbPoweramp are the only two programs to support Accuraterip.

5. Reasonable time is dependant on drive speed, encoder settings, and processor speed. But I'll throw 8 minutes out there as a from-the-hip guess for the average time to encode on my system.

Well, there's ARCue and it's variants as well as TripleFlac, or did you mean only two ripping programs that support AccurateRip?

If it's dependent on drive speed, it's surely dependent on the extraction method and configuration as well.

Most of the online EAC ripping tutorials aren't very good, especially when they give bad advice resulting in rips taking longer than they need to.

Mostly, I meant ripping programs that I knew about. I had no knowledge about ARCue or TripleFlac, so now I've gotten to learn something!

Extraction time - total agreement. It's really hard to summarize a general "reasonable" figure. Drive speed, configuration, verification steps, encoding options, etc. Too many factors to come up with a "No more than x" figure for the minutes involved.

Lets assume EAC with a relatively modern drive, FLAC encoding with -5, burst mode (with accurate rip verification) and a 2 ghz Core 2 processor. < 5 minutes? Certainly not the hour bigidiot experienced.

You can configure EAC for speed you know? In your case if you have CD's that are scratched their might be a lot jitter errors so it's probably not a good idea. I personally use CDex for ripping. It's one of the more faster and secure rippers that exist granted it doesn't do things as thoroughly as EAC or check for C2 errors, but it works well enough for me (this is for ripping of course). If you plan on writing a CD you might want to try Burrn granted this means you decoding FLAC files and writing them as PCM data? (I think this is what you are doing at least?) .

...the length of the CD, but yeah I'd say definitely no more than 10 minutes in burst mode, especially when ripping separate tracks and allowing EAC to queue encodes in the background.

There is the off-chance that something in the system is preventing EAC from working properly, though I'd rather not bother with the troubleshooting unless the OP is actually truly interested in using the program.

wow, good to see so many replies.

I experienced the EAC problems with several music CDs, not just one. Even after the sync failures, it was still taking 60+ minutes to complete. In other words, something was just not working (possibly due to a misconfigured EAC).

Tahnru, when I talked about 320 mp3s, I was referring to something for archiving only.

I probably don't appreciate the value of "secure ripping", but if it causes all my rips to fail, then I don't want it

But thanks for the other recommendations. I'll probably try dbpoweramp.

60+ minutes, with multiple CD's (with at least some of those being in good condition) is either a serious misconfiguration in EAC or an underlying hardware/software issue with your computer.

Secure ripping, from the HA wiki: Secure ripping is the process of making sure there were no errors during the extraction of audio from a CD.

Please read this when considering an audio archive format.

maybe a relevant question:

How much does secure ripping tend to increase ripping time? (200% of original time, 150%, etc)

Also, does secure ripping increase the possibility of failures?

Also, what is bad about a failure? Is it a momentary glitch in the audio quality or something not usually noticeable by the naked ear?

I am not averse to spending more time to rip to flac. But i just want to know what is considered typical.

Thanks.

I have seen such widely varied time differences as to make this question very hard to answer in a general sense. I can provide a direct answer for a specific strategy: The drive is set up to rip in burst mode, and do an accuraterip comparison at the end of the process. All tracks pass the accuraterip check. Additional time to perform this check? 5 seconds or less.

I suppose in a strictly technical sense, secure ripping increases the number of steps involved with the ripping process. More things to go wrong means the probability of failing to rip goes up. In practice however, a proper configuration shouldn't fail to rip - unless you have major damage (i.e. label side scratches) on your CD's.

Secure ripping's strength is that it decreases (nearly eliminates) the chance that an inaccurate rip will go undetected.

Ripping errors can be anywhere from totally undetectable to large, loud jarring bursts of noise. It depends on the error on the disc. Secure ripping gives you the ability to detect these without having to listen to each and every file as you go.

FLAC, Wavpack, TAK, there are a lot of choices. I prefer FLAC for the software/hardware support and tagging abilities.

bigidiot,

Rip a CD in mint condition (scratch-free, mirror-like appearance) and post a log of your results.

Let's stop dancing around the core issue here. Is EAC even working correctly?

greynol, Thanks for the interest in this problem. won't have time to do the EAC test tonight (heck, do I even have a mint condition CD?), but I'll try later in the week and check back.

That will give me time to listen to the flacs/mp3s from freerip and see if they are ok.

You're welcome. You can always configure EAC to rip in burst mode if your discs are in that bad of shape.