Plextor PX-760A bugs?

[JMinSF]

I use a PX-760A for ripping my CD collection, using dBpowerAMP 12.1. I have noticed two strange things with the PX-760A.

1) Most of the time, the read speed is only 8X. I occasionally get 18X. It does not seem to depend on the CD (the same CD sometimes reads fast during testing). Googling the topic seems to indicate that this is really a feature of the firmware, which reads the TOC at beginning and end and gets very conservative on speed if there is any difference - and this is done when you insert the CD, so a single speck of dust will reduce rip speed until the CD is removed

2) dBpowerAMP does not read ISRC and UPC from this drive. It does read them on my other CD drive (Philips 8881, which does not handle C2 errors...). The drive advertises ISRC/UPC reading, dBpowerAMP reports it as supporting ISRC/UPC. The strange thing is that the PX-760A does read the ISRC/UPC using two other programs (PlexTools, and Tau Analyzer), so it may be a bug in dBpowerAMP - or the support in the drive may be half-baked, and DBA uses one of the unimplemented features of the drive, while the other two programs use a different subset of the API...

I think issue (1) is purely a 'feature' of the drive on which DBA has no control whatsoever. Issue (2) may be (partly) a DBA bug.

Side question: DBA keeps a cache of recently seen CDs. Is there a simple way to clear this cache [e.g. to check out the ISRC issue ...].

Thanks,

[Walburga]

Re: Plextor PX-760A bugs?

I really hope you're problems are fixed, because just today I ordered a PX-760A to start ripping my collection of 700+ CDs with dBpoweramp v12.1!

--Walburga

[LtData]

Re: Plextor PX-760A bugs?

I believe that Plextor's internally vary the speed.

As for ISRC and UPC reading, I have no idea on this, Spoon would know.

[JMinSF]

Re: Plextor PX-760A bugs?

Don't take me wrong - the PX-760 works just fine for ripping (I also got it to rip my entire CD collection, >2000 CDs - I'm at about 500 now...). It's just a bit slower than I would like it to be. To be honest, much more time is spent fixing up tags than ripping - AMG is pretty good, but has occasional blind spots or outright errors. freeDB is pretty abysmal for classical music.

dBpowerAMP does a great job with with the PX-760 in terms of recovering old CDs (some of my CDs are > 20 yrs old). So, I don't think it's a bad choice at all for massive ripping.

The ISRC/UPC issue is an annoyance because I would like to use the ISRC to check automatically for duplicate tracks in reissues - but it's not a killer - most people do not care one iota for ISRC and UPC codes.

[Shastya]

Re: Plextor PX-760A bugs?

I have a Plextor PX-760A also and I have the same problem with it (reverting back to 8x ripping speed). I hate it when it does this because I believe it rips just as accurately at the much faster speeds that it only sometimes attains. So .... I'm sending mine back. I paid for much more than 8x ripping speed. I'm going to try to buy brand new Plextor PX-240A when it becomes available at Plextor's website. It's just a CD burner but it's all I need for ripping CDs. I've got 3 other DVD burners so that's not an issue.

[Shastya]

Re: Plextor PX-760A bugs?

Oh and one other thing.... I updated the firmware to the latest and it didn't fix the ripping speed problem. It still rips at 8x most of the time.... about 10 to 15% of the time it decides to rip at its full speed (30x). I'm very disappointed with this drive. :cry: