30GB wasted effort?

RoadTripper · « **on:** 29 Dec 2005, 06:09 pm »

I have about 40 GB of CDs ripped. But on numerous tracks there are dropouts. I am testing this all out with Slimserver and Softsqueeze. I am starting to worry that my laptop, on which I am doing this, is too lame to handle the work. The CD Drive fails to read about 1 of every 6 CDs I put in it. My CPU is a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4. I have 256M ram.

I am suspecting the ripping is where the bad scans result, not the encoding or the playback.

I am especially suspicious when I read that others here can rip and encode in under 15 minutes. I have seen rips take as long as an hour. I am now doing the Test&Copy option (F6) and the rip time has lowered to about 12 minutes, sometimes more.

I won't know the whole story until I get the actual SB3 in house. Then I will know if I have to upgrade the PC platform and start all over.

Any ideas?

Paul_Bui · « **Reply #1 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 06:40 pm »

I'd agree on the cause of the dropouts. Whenever more CDs are to be added to the hard drive, I stop the server, rip the CDs, re-start the server and have it re-scan the library all over. No dropouts then whatsoever.

I bought an internal Plextor drive, and ever since the CD ripping went like a sharp knife cutting butter. Even in the most demanding secured mode, a full 650MB - 720MB CD ripping can take as little as 6 minutes. And how quiet it does so. I'm thinking of purchasing another Plextor drive, whose price is getting lower, to replace the slow noisy one that came with my Dell PC. Funny, the stock drive didn't seem to be that inferior until I got the Plextor.

ctviggen · « **Reply #2 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 06:46 pm »

It takes me 20-30 minutes to rip a CD using EAC and FLAC.

ted_b · « **Reply #3 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 06:51 pm »

My total is about 6 or 7. My average cd rips with EAC in 5 minutes (at an average of 8.2x speed) with error correction and secure rips all at highest level, and then another 1-2 minutes to later convert to flac level 5 (which I do in a kind of batch process when I have a boatload of wav filed albums ready to encode). I don't do it in one process (using the flac plugins for EAC) cuz I want to do some things with the perfect wav file in the meantime (like import into iTunes with 224aac).

My drive is a cheap, fast but fairly loud, LiteOn LTR52327S. Does secure ripping nicely. EAC is very drive-dependent, and although I agree that the cpu is important, I've seen EAC fly on lower end pc's with the right cd drive. Mine can be found easily for $30-35.

ricmon · « **Reply #4 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 06:56 pm »

I strongly suggest a cpu upgrade. new dual core chips will go along way to cure youe ills. price strart around $250.00 bucks for both intel and amd. Don't mess with the single core 64 bit chips as the problems you guys a experincing have more to do with cpu usage and in that case more cores the better.

sts9fan · « **Reply #5 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 07:02 pm »

Quote

My CPU is a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4. I have 256M ram.

Quote

I strongly suggest a cpu upgrade

Give me a break he has more then enough power there. I have a dedicated box for my music server and its only a 733 Celeron. It has no problems with anything. a 1.6P4 is plenty. Your problems lay elsewhere.

Tyson · « **Reply #6 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 07:18 pm »

Pull up windows Task manager while you are ripping the CD. Sort by Memory usage and see if anything is eating up large amounts of memory while you are ripping. If so, kill that app and try re-ripping. If still having problems, sort the list of processes in task manager by CPU usage and see if anything is causing cpu spikes. If so, kil that process & try re-ripping. If neither of these actions fix anything, then it's time for a new cd drive. And if that does not fix it, then a new (internal) HD is in order.

Thump553 · « **Reply #7 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 07:18 pm »

I'm betting on the problem being the CD drive, also. Every CD drive or burner I had crap out (and there have been quite a few over the years) have had the inability to read some discs as the first sign.

I know replacing internal laptop drives is pretty pricey. Is there a way you can use an external CD drive with your laptop?

lcrim · « **Reply #8 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 07:22 pm »

Your rips are taking way too long. Take a look at your EAC configuration or maybe look at getting a USB CD to do your ripping. More RAM never hurts either. I have an older laptop w/ a PIII 1GHZ and I never see rip times as long as you are getting.

bpape · « **Reply #9 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 07:29 pm »

I have an old 1.8GHz machine with 256M RAM that I use for ripping and storing using EAC and FLAC. It runs a Pioneer drive and I did put in a newer HD with an 8MB cache and rips usually in about 12 minutes or so. I've had no problems with dropouts.

I'd agree that it's likely a problem with either the CD drive starting to crap out or other processes running on the machine that are eating too much RAM. That will cause swapping to the HD and you can get a bottleneck with a slower drive/smaller cache/less RAM combination.

ctviggen · « **Reply #10 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 07:39 pm »

Interesting. Thanks for the tips. I'll see how long the rips are taking. Note that this computer also serves my SB2 (which has a very hard time while EAC is running -- if I start the SB2 playing, there's typically no problem; if I try to change anything while EAC is running, all hell breaks loose). My home computer has 512 mb of RAM and is an Athlon CPU; I forget what speed. I'm running XP. I'll see what times I'm getting, but they're long. I'll be burning tons of CDs this weekend. I have EAC so that FLAC runs after each song.

ricmon · « **Reply #11 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 08:13 pm »

Quote from: sts9fan

Quote
My CPU is a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4. I have 256M ram.

Quote
I strongly suggest a cpu upgrade

Give me a break he has more then enough power there. I have a dedicated box for my music server and its only a 733 Celeron. It has no problems with anything. a 1.6P4 is plenty. Your problems lay elsewhere.

A single core for a sigle task. My responce was to the performance hit doing multitasking.

ted_b · « **Reply #12 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 10:28 pm »

Quote from: ctviggen

Interesting. Thanks for the tips. I'll see how long the rips are taking. Note that this computer also serves my SB2 (which has a very hard time while EAC is running -- if I start the SB2 playing, there's typically no problem; if I try to change anything while EAC is running, all hell breaks loose). My home computer has 512 mb of RAM and is an Athlon CPU; I forget what speed. I'm running XP. I'll see what times I'm getting, but they're long. I'll be burning tons of CDs this weekend. I have EAC so that FLAC runs after each song.

Hmm, I think we're on to something here. I have a fairly robust Pentium 4 3 gigahertz machine with 512meg Ram, and I'm here to tellya that Flac encoding takes over my machine. I do it all at once (multiple wav files...mine are cd-length) and walk away. Furthermore, I don't even move my mouse when I'm ripping cd's with EAC cuz I want perfect rips (although for less important rips I can multiprocess ok...EAC is not the hog that flac is). Anyway, your EAC times may be long due to two simultaneous problems.....an inefficent cd drive incapable of good secure rips, AND (I think most importantly) having the FLAC encoding hog run in the background. I could never do that with my machine. And don't plan on ANYTHING else running in your machine, let alone a souncard output! Take care of your rips, they will love you for it.

jermmd · « **Reply #13 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 11:08 pm »

I have dual dvd drives in my computer and I burn 2 CD's at a time no problem. I doubt the CPU is the problem as I can surf the web while burning CDs and I don't experience any slow downs. I use EAC/Flac and it only takes a couple of minutes (definitely less than 10 minutes). I too think the CD drive is the most likely limiting factor but I don't know for sure.

RoadTripper · « **Reply #14 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 11:14 pm »

It seems that most of my dropouts happen at the beginning of a track. By the way, these dropouts sound a lot like what bad FM reception sounds like. They also sound a lot like a regular skipping CD/player sounds.They also recurr exactly as before each time the track is replayed.

I also get a different kind of dropout that I believe happens during playback. Like when I switch to another program that sucks CPU, I will get a noticeably louder sound. These kinds of things don't repeat on secondary testing, i.e. they don't happen at the same place each time in the track.

ricmon · « **Reply #15 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 11:47 pm »

are your hd and cd durner in the same ide channel? if so that may be your problem. if they are try moving the burner to an alternate ide channel.

ricmon · « **Reply #16 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 11:53 pm »

ctviggen
one last thing make sure that the the transfer mode for ths ide channel is set to DMA mode. this is done through the device manger.

bpape · « **Reply #17 on:** 29 Dec 2005, 11:58 pm »

The IDE channel may well be an issue.

As for running FLAC in the background, I do that on that old 1.8GHz machine all the time - and with only 256M RAM. No problems. Now, I don't run anything else while I'm doing it but still. Doing those 2 thing together as long as you have a good quick CD drive capable of secure reading and a decent HD buffer you should be fine.

You also might want to check how the write behind caching is set on the HD.

RoadTripper · « **Reply #18 on:** 30 Dec 2005, 05:39 pm »

My test failed. I decided to do a rip with nothing else going on (application wise) both during rip and compress.

I still have garbage on playback.

I am off to buy a new external CD-ROM drive for my laptop.