EAC woes (1 Viewer)

[Daren Welsh]

I've installed the latest version of EAC as of yesterday, as well as the latest version of LAME. I popped in a CD and tried to rip mp3's in 320 kbps just for kicks. Every time I tried this, it would do a few tracks okay, but most of the tracks were cut off. I noticed in the LAME window that it was spitting out LOTS of errors. I didn't take care to note what exactly they were, but I can list them tonight if it would help. I recall one had the word "flush".
Anyway, I'm sure there's help on the EAC site or possibly on r3mix, but I was hoping someone could give me a quick idea of what's going on before I dive into their forums. Right now I'm pretty sure it's just a configuration problem with EAC or LAME, but I don't know where to start looking.

 

[Camp]

Did you try more than one CD? Some discs just have problems.

What versions of LAME and EAC are "latest" versions? Perhaps stepping back to an older version would help.

 

[Daren Welsh]

Well, I actually tried two ... but that's a good point.
I just found this EAC FAQ with a good walkthrough for the beginner. There's a bit in there about disabling the CD-ROM's cache and it sounds like that could possibly be my problem. So I think tonight I'll go through this guy's procedure and give it another go.
I'm also running Win2k and I see they have had problems configuring EAC for 2k before. I might have to read more into that.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Have you done the configuration of your CD drive? You need to make sure you're using the correct offset and read settings.

 

[Daren Welsh]

Well, I tried several different CDs last night. I also had the program autodetect my drives' settings (I tried both drives). After using the detected "correct" settings on cache, autostream, and C2 correction, I also tried different on/off settings with those parameters. Every time I rip a CD, I still end up with some of the tracks cut off because of some error in LAME. I'm pretty sure that every time there's an error in a track, Winamp reports an incorrect track length. So at least there's a way to detect faulty tracks w/o having to listen to each one. I can also tell because there are leftover files in the temp directory. There's usually two leftover files per faulty track. One's a .wav and I can't remember what the other is.

I think it's time to read about LAME and see if there are some delimiters I should try since the error seems to only happen in the LAME console window.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Instead of getting EAC to fire off the Lame processing, just let it rip the tracks and save to your hard drive. Then use RazorLame to batch-process the lot.

 

[Max Leung]

Do you have DMA enabled on that CDROM? Are the .WAV files themselves incomplete?

It almost sounds like the CDROM is having a conflict with the hard drive...dropping sound samples for example.

Check your DMA settings for your hard drive and CD-ROM! They should be enabled!

I assume you're using LAME version 3.9 or later...

 

[Nigel McN]

plenty of harddrive space?

 

[Daren Welsh]

Using RazorLame after just using EAC for the .wav extraction only verifies that this is a problem with LAME. I'm running version 3.92 right now. Where can I find older versions?

I'm not sure how to check my drives' DMA settings. I looked in the hardware manager (win2k) but I don't think I know where to look.

I've got 8 GB free on the drive I'm using for this. With a gig of ram, I don't think memory is a problem ... unless the program doesn't take advantage of that w/o a delimiter.

 

[Max Leung]

Go to the device manager, and look at the properties for Primary IDE Controller and again for the Secondary IDE Controller. Make sure DMA is enabled for both. Win2k generally defaults to "DMA Enabled", but in some cases it may quietly change them to "PIO mode" if CRC errors were found on the drives.

 

[Daren Welsh]

Well, you were right about it being on PIO, but even after changing both to DMA if Available, LAME still won't work properly.

I've tried pretty much every configuration, too ... from 128 kbps no-variable-bit-rate to having all the bells and whistles enabled.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Daren, click here to download this version. It's Lame 3.89 alpha 9 which I've been using for months.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Correction, it's 3.90 alpha 7.

 

[Daren Welsh]

Same thing happens with 3.90a7 :frowning:
Something worth noting is that I went back to EAC doing it all in one swoop--the CD->WAV->MP3 (using LAME). When I used 3.92 it seemed to get through 2 or 3 songs before it had the flush() errors and crashed.
Also, in EAC under compression options, there's a place to enter additional command line options for LAME. By default it had "%l--alt-preset 128%l%h--alt-preset standard%h %s %d" (minus the quotes). In my fiddling-around process, I deleted that line and tried running the job. Once it reached LAME it tried a command that LAME didn't like (bad delimiters or something). So then I tried using "-b 320 -m s -V 0 -B 320", which is the setting I last tried in RazorLame. That didn't work either; it responded as if there were an error in my syntax.
Guess I'll have to try more when I get home from work ...

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Daren - what CD-ROM drive are you using? It could just be down to an incompatibilty between it and EAC. The program isn't as foolproof and perfect as it tries to make itself out to be. For example, if I rip using a Teac CD-540E CD-ROM, I sometimes get a glitch just after the track starts. This doesn't happen everytyime, maybe 1 out of 3-4. This I've had happen with two CD-540Es (made in different years) and on two separate PCs. When I rip from my Plextor CD-RW, it's perfect every time.

Nero rips pretty well.

 

[Daren Welsh]

I've got two: One is a Sony Spressa CD-R/RW and the other is a Toshiba CD/DVD.

I'm not sure this is an issue with the drives, though, because I'm able to rip from CD to WAV just fine. It's when I run LAME to encode the WAV's to MP3 that I get errors.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

For Lame to reject the file though, there has to be something wrong with it. I have 30gb worth MP3s on my system (around 5500 files) and never got an error like that.

Can you try ripping the tracks with another application and then Lame-ing them? If they work then we've narrowed down the problem.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Something else to mention while I'm here:

On EAC - under 'Drive Options' - are you extracting in 'Secure Mode'? It's the best to use. You'll need to do the 'Detect Read Features' thing first though.

 

[Daren Welsh]

Yeah, used secure mode.

Well, I tried ripping the WAV's with CDex and then using LAME --> same results.

Also, I just tried using winLAME to encode the WAV's I got from EAC and it crashed just like RazorLame did.

 

[Max Leung]

Darren, can you listen to the WAV files that LAME crashes on? Just to ensure the WAV files aren't corrupted.

Is your CDROM on the same IDE cable as the harddrive? If so, you should put them on separate IDE cables.