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sorry guys...need some more of your advice! I'm trying to put my mixes on my computer in the form of mp3, to share on kazaa. but i'm having some really slow DAE speeds.

hope i'm not forgetting anything:
windows xp home
p4 2.2GHz
768mb ram
buslink liteon 52246s firmware 650c
DMA on

-using audio catalyst, was only ripping at 1x.

-using EAC/LAME (got this from a anandtech article) started at 10x, dropped to 0.2x. not to mention the mp3s created werent even working.

my old 24x plextor & 40x artec had much faster rip speeds. I was hoping for a lot more, if not comparable out of my new liteon drive. If you guys have a different program setup to make mp3s, i'd appreciate any info.

I'm not sure what's going wrong on your system, but I have a BUSLink/LiteOn LTR-52246S firmware 6S0D and just ran a test using AudioGrabber to rip a CD while simultaneously encoding to MP3 with LAME encoder.

Everything went exceedingly fast and error free. Are you sure that your source disc is in good shape?

Keep in mind that if you are ripping and encoding to MP3 simultaneously, the overall speed will be lower than just ripping to WAV files. Even so, this would not account for the problem you are experiencing.

If you are using Secure Mode in EAC,

EAC.txt wrote:this program reads every audio sector at least twice. That is one reason why the program is so slow. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case,bad sectors are read up to 82 times!

This would certainly account for slow speeds while using EAC.

I would suggest running the DAE test in Nero CD Speed with an audio disc of known good quality to see if the drive is performing DAE efficiently. If not, the most common problem encountered is DMA not being properly implemented even if it appears to be enabled in Device Manager. Try the CD Speed test and report the results. If the results are normal, check the settings in AudioCatalyst to make sure that something isn't forcing slow operation.

If you're running XP Home and your ripping speeds(CD & DVD)are very slow go to Device Manager and remove your Hard Disk Controllers and reboot.What happens is over time the controllers revert to PIO and doing this trick will reset them to DMA.