Ripping CD's got very slow all of a sudden

[Unregistered]

I've been using dMC Audio CD Input to rip/encode my CD's into Monkeys audio. While converting I was seeing rip speeds up to around 30x and encoding speeds of around 30x realtime. It was taking around 3 min or so to rip an entire CD into Monkeys Audio format. Then all of a sudden everything slowed down. Instead of reaching 30x rip speed, I'm lucky if it gets up to 6x and the encoding is usually somewhere between 2-3x. Instead of continually ripping and encoding, it seems to lag and then encode a bunch of data all at once. It now takes around 8-10 minutes to rip a CD into Monkeys Audio.

Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know what the cause might be and how I can fix it?

[Spoon]

Try converting a monkeys file to monkeys file, what speed is it?

[Unregistered]

I tested a 4 min song converting it from Monkeys to Monkeys in the same folder and to a different drive. The speed said 16X and it took around 14 sec for both. I also tried connecting a friend's external USB 2 CD ROM and tried ripping from a CD directly to Monkeys. It took 1 min 55 sec but my internal CD ROM (exactly the same specs 52X CD ROM) took 2 min 52 sec to rip the same CD to the same folder.

I had read somewhere on your site about the copy protection software that CD's sometimes contain that install themselves on your computer. Given that the problem happened suddenly and right in the middle of me converting all my CD's to Monkeys, I'm just worried that's what happened. Can this type of software juat affect certain drives? Is there any way to tell?

Thanks

[Spoon]

It is possible.

Have you done a full shut down / reboot of the PC?