I have run into a problem ripping some audiobook CDs with EAC.

I am pretty sure the problem is not EAC, but rather a limitation of my CD burner.

The burner is a "Philips SPD2513P SCSI CdRom Device", and apparently it will not read the final two or three tracks on any of the audiobook CDs. These CDs follow the unhappy but unfortunately all too common practice of splitting the CD into anywhere from 15 to 25 short tracks, some of them as little as a minute or so in duration. EAC says that the CD I am working with at the moment is 16 tracks, 1:06:17 in duration at 669.13 MB, and will compress down to 46.61 MB. (Yes, I know, that is a lot of compression (14:1) but this is an audiobook with very limited dynamic range so it compresses to a higher degree than might otherwise be expected.)

EAC compresses at about 20-21x speed until it hits the last three tracks, at which point progress ceases. Eventually it errors out.

The reason I think it is not an EAC problem is that Windows Media Player also will not play these tracks. It loads them and tries to play them, but just stutters along in fits and starts.

I think what this process is trying to tell me is that I need a better CD/DVD burner. The Philips burner is brand new, perhaps 10 hours of usage on it.

So, now the questions.

1) Do I need a different/better burner, or am I overlooking something obvious?

2) What CD/DVD burner will run happily with EAC and Windows Vista?

Question 2 is of particular importance to me. My last three burners (the Philips I have now, a brand new Lite-On before that, and a used and well-tested Samsung before that) all gave unsatisfactory performance with EAC, requiring me to turn off all error correction (i.e., secure mode) features to get any speed higher than 0.4x ripping speed. The burner I had before those was a five year old Lite-On CD only (no DVD) that consistently gave me 24x burning speed while in secure mode.

What should I do now?

tanstaafl.

Assuming it really is SCSI and that's not just an artifact of some weird driver issue, you may have the only SCSI optical drive on the market. Newegg doesn't seem to offer one at all. Point being, you probably can't get a "better" one.

It is a SATA drive, hence the SCSI bit IMO.

No real suggest other then breaking the task into two steps, ripping and compression.

Hi,

I saw some similar burning speeds with my DVD-Burner drive. I have both CD/DVD-Burner and CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drives.

I found that if I used the DVD burner, that I usually had a slower ripping speed while creating my music database master (a copy of all my Audio CDs). I ripped all of the CDs as .WAV files to a 750 GB drive (just over 600 GB now - mostly Classic Rock). The rip speed varied between 4X - 6X.

When I moved to the CD/DVD-ROM only drive, I received much better performance >40X for individual tracks, and up to 30+ for the entire CD. It always starts out slower at around 8X and builds up to 30X - 40X and I have seen 47X once. I only use the CD/DVD-ROM for operation with EAC.

I have also had similar results with a CD/DVD-ROM Lite-On Combo Model SOHC-4836V drive. The trick here might be the DVD-ROM, though I'm not sure. All of my system drives are IDE not SCSI too (except the system drive which is SATA) in my current system.

If you have the availability for an IDE drive, that may be another way to go. SCSI can be a very high performance peripheral bus. I once designed a Quad Fast-Wide SCSI card with 4 NCR-820 devices on a PCI Speedway (original 33 MHz PCI reflected wave technology specification), with full arbitration and script RAM on a proprietary 64 bit wide, 66MHz, GTL+, Split Transaction I/O Bus (STIO) host interface bus. I did the board design & layout, someone else did the code. But that was back in 1993 for an Enterprise Class Server, I'm sure that things are better nowadays.

My previous Gateway system also had a SCSI bus as well as IDE. Have you configured the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat (I don't know what Vista does with the equivalent entries for the Lastdrive= , etc). I just have XP-Media.

What SCSI card are you using?, What drivers, are you shadowing the BIOS, where is the shadow located? Is it being stepped on by another user, you know, the usual...

Ross

I used to use FreeRip and just recently changed over to EAC. From what I've read about it, it should be the most robust ripping option- able to get tracks off of damaged CDs and such.

As you described, though, even WinMediaPlayer can't play the tracks on the CD, so something is going afoul in PC land.

Could you copy an ISO image to your hard drive and then 'rip'/compress from the hard drive?
EAC should try to work out getting all the info off the CD... but as you said it seems to get stumped along the way.
Hmm... dunno...

I'm guessing you've got a duff drive and you'd run into the same problem with later tracks on a music CD as well. (A music CD that's 66 minutes long at least.)

The thing about CD balance and tracking mechanisms is that they get increasingly unstable and unreliable the farther you get from the center of the disc. (CDs read from the center outward, the opposite of those ancient LP records I'm sure you're so familiar with.)

Another thing to consider is the ripping speed. The higher the ripping speed, the faster the disc turns and the more likely that an iffy tracking mechanism is not going to be able to keep up.

I say try ripping at a slower rip speed and see what's up.

What are the names of the last three tracks? Do the name have any unusual characters in them?

These days, Windows Media Player defaults to digitally ripping the CD in order ot play it. The feature is called something like "play digitally" or somesuch. If you uncheck that feature in windows media player, then it will play the disc as an audio CD at the normal 1x spin speed and then we shall see if the drive is able to play the disc's outer edges.

Under Vista, Right click the top bar somewhere (why do menus default to hidden now in every MS app?) got to Tools, Options. Then under Devices, click the drive and hit properties.

Odds are digital will be the only choice though, analog is there but disabled for me. I don't think integrated sound cards have the necessary input anymore for CD for a while now.

I have one. Or used to, anyway... not sure if I still do, or not, since I decommissioned my last SCSI board and devices, a few years ago. If it really is a SCSI cdrom, and you think it might help, I could take a look and see if I still have it.

Google says that model is SATA, not "real SCSI". That page also encourages Philips users to upgrade their device firmware in case of problems...

Peter

No doubt you are right. I just clicked "Properties" in Explorer to get the model number of the drive and typed in what it told me.

The fact that Windows Media player can't play the outer tracks suggests that either there is something weird with the CDs or, as Tony suggested, a duff drive. My next diagnostic step will be to bring the CDs to work and see how the various computers there deal with them.

tanstaafl.

EAC Automatically slows down the speed of the unit as it runs into difficulty. (An ugly aspect of this is that once it gets past the difficult part, it doesn't speed back up again, so if there is damage on the first track, even though the rest of the CD might be pristine, the remainder of the rip is at the slower speed.) In the case of the CDs I'm trying to rip, it works its way up to about 24x, then when it hits the last few tracks I hear the platter speed going slower and slower until I can't hear it at all and watch the 24x slowly degrade down towards zero over a period of 5--10 minutes.

One of the CDs showed a total file usage in excess of 710 MB, which I thought was "against the rules". Perhaps the maker of the CDs did this in an effort to prevent copying?

tanstaafl.

As Peter pointed out, even though it showed as SCSI in the Properties dialog box, it really is a SATA drive.

When it reaches those outermost tracks, I can hear the heads doing large seeks trying to read the data. Makes me think it is likely a hardware issue. I get the same symptoms using Windows Media Player just trying to play (not rip) the outer tracks.

tanstaafl.

As Tony said though, it's now WMP's method to play CD tracks digitally, which basically means that it's ripping the CD and just not saving it anywhere. Tom listed instructions about how to turn that off so you could test the drive under normal Audio CD conditions.

It would be "against the rules" for a data CD, but audio CDs are different. They have less error-correction, so there's more space left for actual data capacity. The WAV files that correspond to an 80-minute audio CD would add up to 807MB.

Peter

I tried it on three different computers here at work. One of them, with a combination DVD/CD burner wouldn't even see the disk at all. The other two, with CD-only capabilities, worked like my home computer -- tried to read the final tracks but couldn't get a clean read, skipping and stuttering until finally failing completely.

Is this evidence that the problem lies with the "beyond boundaries" writing to the CD itself?

Hmmm... I have a cheap portable CD player kicking around the house somewhere that will probably play those tracks. Maybe I can take the headphone output from that, run it into the microphone input of my sound card and get Total Recorder to turn those "bad" tracks into MP3 files.

Or maybe just skip those tracks altogether. I can see it now -- the end of the audiobook, and the inspector is saying: "And, the murderer is [stutter crackle skip skip...]"

Oh, wait -- late breaking news flash. I tried the CD on the oldest, slowest computer we have, one with an ancient read-only CD player. It played the end tracks without problem. So... maybe I can take all nine of the CDs in question, copy the end tracks of each one onto the hard drive, move them across the network onto my computer, burn them onto a CD, take that CD home and add that CD to my ripping/encoding project.

Sigh... do I really want to listen to that audiobook that much?

tanstaafl.

Hm. Based on the behavior... I wonder if the behavior you're seeing is (as was suggested earlier in the thread) that these are copy-protected CDs, designed to play on audio CD players but refusing to fully play on computer CD drives.

Were all of the audiobooks from the same publisher and the same series?

A single audiobook, 9 disks, averaging 18 files per disk, every disk showed same behavior.

I used the one computer here in the office that would read the "over-filled" tracks to rip just the final 5 tracks from each CD to MP3, using Windows Media Player's 128 fixed bit rate and I'll use EAC/LAME to do all the rest of the tracks and then put them all together on a single MP3 CD.

I don't think it was anything as deliberate as copy protection. I think they were just trying to save 15 cents on every $49 set by cramming 9 hours of audio onto 8 CDs.

tanstaafl.

Are the CDs over-long, then? The original standard said 74 minutes (allegedly to accommodate Beethoven's 9th), but I've never had a problem ripping the 80-minute CDs that are now viewed as the maximum.

There are, as tfabris suggests, CD copy-protection mechanisms which can cause these symptoms. If the CD is multi-session, say dual-session, and has a bogus TOC in the second session, then audio CD players will play it correctly (as they're not typically multi-session aware), but CD-ROM drives will get confused. Fortuitously, Rio Central will rip such CDs (it deliberately reads the first-session TOC to avoid problems caused by mis-mastering) but I'm not sure what else will. Do the CDs or packaging have the "compact disc" logo? They usually aren't allowed to do that if they incorporate copy protection.


You can get 9 hours of audio on 7 CDs. My best guess is also that they're being cheapskates, but I think only by using an unreliable CD production house whose CDs wander out of spec at the outer edge.

Still not as cheapskate as the disc I heard of once where they'd got a two-hour mono recording onto one CD by making their listeners play it once through with the left channel muted, then again with the right channel muted...

Peter

Genious! Sheer, unadulterated genious!

I dunno. I had it in my mind that 700 MB was the limit for a "legal" CD, but that is only because Nero flags everything past that in red as a warning. I think 711 MB was the biggest disc in the set, but I don't think any of them ran much over 70 minutes, and some of them ran as little as 65 minutes/660 MB. Yet the last couple of tracks on every one of them (sometimes just one track, once as many as five) would not rip properly on my home computer and three computers at work but yet ripped with no problems on a fourth work computer.

It didn't seem like the cd player was getting "confused" -- it found the tracks with no problem, but the closer it got to the outer edge of the CD, the more the performance degraded (in a quite linear fashion), first with artifacts, then pauses, then skips, then garbled sound, and finally just halted.

I have ripped similar CDs without difficulty, and since at least four different computers had trouble with this set, I think you may be right and these are just badly printed CDs.

tanstaafl.

That is insane, I want it.

Nope. Not copy protected (I did find one CD-ROM player that would read them) but instead just poorly mastered CDs,

I just finished ripping/encoding another audiobook tonight from a different publisher, and the disks were all 750+ MBs (74 minutes) and there were no problems whatsoever with them.

tanstaafl.

I have run into the same problem with some audio books I have just bought (12 Penguin Classics for £30).

Can't get EAC, Media Player or Winamp to rip them on any of the three CD/DVD drives I have tried so far. Need to dig out my old Pentium 90 laptop as that seems to be able to rip things (very slowly) that other drives can't. Shame there are about 50 disks to rip

The disks aren't even particularly long, one only has 54 minutes on it.

I reality I suspect I'll never get round to do it and as I don't have a CD player in the house anymore (except the DVD player plugged into the TV) I'll never get to listen to them

Speaking of CD ripping (sorry to drag this OT!)...

Does anyone know of a decent CD ripper for OSX? Right now I'm using MAX.

I was just examining this question last night. I can't find anything better than Max.

Do you have a particular problem with Max? It seems to work fine for me.

I would like to figure out how to get it to start automatically when I insert an audio CD.

I was just about to ask whether the Linux ones (eg. cdparanoia) ran on MacOS, but fortunately I googled Max first, and it is a port of cdparanoia to MacOS. That probably means that no, you won't find a better one. (Or, at least, you won't find a more effective one. There might be other ones with better UIs or whatever.)

Peter

I'm running Leopard and the MAX version for that is in beta and has been a bit flaky for me. I'm trying to get caught up on my CD ripping. I'm ripping to both FLAC and MP3.