EAC is the best ripper out there, in my experience, and in most of yours based on what I've read in this forum. My main issue is that sometimes it has error problems while other times it doesn't on the same track. When I get a track with errors, I always try to re-rip it at a later date. If the cd is truly scratched, I'll get the same errors in the same spot. But usually the range of time in which errors occur varies, which is understandable enough. But the annoying thing is that sometimes a track will rip with no errors at all, while other times it will be bogged down in error correction for nearly the entire track. I think that if there's a sync error on the first block, EAC may view the whole track as out of sync for its remainder, and be doing error correct the whole rest of the way. Or maybe the problem is just with my cd-rom drive. Comments? Advice? Moral support deriving out of similar experience?

Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Sometimes when I test the track before I rip it, the test is riddled with error retries, but then the actual rip takes 30 seconds. It's very weird, does someone know the reason for this?

I had this happen once too.

What kind of drive are you using? My Plextor 40x will rip it exactly the same everytime without any variation like you're seeing. The only way it'll do anything differently is if you're switching between C2 on/off.

Sure, I've got a cheap drive, generic E-IDE 50X L (that's all I know) that came with the computer which I bought before I knew anything about digital/compressed audio (except that I liked cd sound quality better than tape). But the drive works pretty well... most the time in EAC secure mode, it reads between 5x and 7x, and the drive itself doesn't do caching. But my drive is probably a greater source of inconsistency than EAC is.
Somtimes it seems that EAC gets off on the "wrong foot" so to speak - I'll get a sync error at the beginning of a track, and it'll check every sector for the rest of the song using error correct mode and find nothing, just because it was initially out of sync. When I rip a range going over the same stuff, it doesn't need to error check any of it. I'll probably get a Plextor when I buy a burner... but is it bad practice to use a burner drive for regular reads? I figure I'll use my current cd-rom drive for most reads, but use the burner drive to read scratched or sync-challenged discs.

I've recently bought Athlon XP 1600 and for a CD-ROM I took my old ASUS S400 from my old Pentium MMX computer. This drive worked very well in the old PC, but in the new one I got a lot of synchro errors in EAC and hot disks after extraction. I managed to solve this problem by plugging the drive into another port of a 2 port ATA-33 cable and by placing it into the 2nd (from the top to the bottom) 5.25 port of my middletower (instead of the 1st(highest)). Now the drive is as fast as lightning and the disks do not get hot even after 2 hour spinning in the drive.

ahh... all the beautiful software out there and hardware is still the limiting factor. Maybe someday there'll be screens that don't noticeably fluctuate in brightness (this can be more easily seen on a videotape of a computer screen, but I can notice it just looking at the screen in real life) and a heat sink system that doesn't require noisy fans... computer labs are so loud, it kills the soul

Anyway, my drive may limit EAC's functionality at times, and perhaps EAC limits its own functionality somewhat. But at least I know that when EAC says I got a perfect rip ("copy OK"), I did get a perfect rip.

hi, i have been having this same problem with eac, when i select all the tracks, it always errs on the third track, if i close eac and then open it again, i can rip that track fine.

I have a LG-ROM CRD-8322B And I even cracked part of the tray clear through and i get consistant rips. Too bad they are slow rips though errrrrrrr.

I've got a problem with lightly scratched discs.
The cd is ripped without any errors in EAC, but there is clearly a few errors when listening to it.

I am using a Plextor 32TSi drive.

Changing the Speed Setting from Actual to 4X seems to have cured the problem.