reading speed drops to 8x - fixed

[wkasdo]

Hi,

I spend a couple of hours troubleshooting this, so I thought I'd share this.

After ripping a particularly badly scratched CD I noticed that the ripping speed never exceeded 8x anymore. Before, I'd get up to 32x.

My first step was to blame dbPoweramp (sorry!), but after some fooling around I found out that the problem was elsewhere. My Sony optiarc 7240S was mapped to a Secondary IDE device and was stuck in PIO mode, which explains the slowness. Windows does this after it receives too many errors on that particular IDE channel. Fixing that was not so easy, because there is no way to force the mode from the Device Manager GUI.

I'm running dbPoweramp on Windows Home Server, which is a variant of Windows Server 2003. From a driver perspective, this is very close to Windows XP, so anyone with similar problems may try the same fix that solved it for me: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/

Basically, you de-install the driver to force a new configuration. It takes two boots. I'd be happy to get a faster solution, because I'm sure this will happen again someday.

[wkasdo]

Re: reading speed drops to 8x - fixed

Again ;-)

To be sure, I ripped 500 CD's since that last error.

[thegreatnorth]

Re: reading speed drops to 8x - fixed

With my experience I've noticed it has a lot to do with the Audio CD that you are ripping that dictates the speed.

I have always used a Plextor PX-716A with dbpoweramp and noticed that with one band (don't remember which one) three of their cd's (factory pressed) used the same media and all would only rip at a maximum of 8x. Each time I had a cd that would lock at 8x I would check technical details (in secure options) and dbpoweramp would should max speed of 8x for current.

Maybe someone else could verify this?

[wkasdo]

Re: reading speed drops to 8x - fixed

In my case, the device manager showed PIO mode. That's on the device driver level, out of reach of dbPoweramp. But I guess the same symptom may have multiple causes.