Drop in MP3 quality

[Unregistered]

I have encountered a drop in the quality of the MP3s ripped from CDs using dMC Audio CD Input. I am mystified by this as I used to get excellent quality with an earlier release. Now I get intermittent clicks and little fizzes reminiscent of playing a dusty LP. Have you come across this problem and is there a solution?

For ripping I am using dMC Audio CD Input release 9 with the dMC PowerPack. My settings are:
Slow accurate ripping
Rip speed = 8
Rip to RAM using Auto maximum
Bit rate = 320 kbps
Codec = Lame
I have applied a patch that was necessary for running under Windows Me.

For playback I am using dBpowerAMP Audio Player release 1.

On an earlier version of dMC Audio CD Input (I guess it was release 8 - it had support for the Blade codec) I did not encounter these problems. I used to play back using Real Jukebox. In fact I started using dMC Audio CD Input because I had had similar problems when I used Audiograbber with the BladeEnc codec.

Let me know if you need more details of my setup or the generated MP3s.

[Spoon]

Try Slow Accurate Ripping off,
Rip speed to Maximum,
Rip to Ram - on with Auto
Encode at same time switched on

You can also try ripping to a Wave file, to listen to uncompressed audio, I don't think it will be with Lame compressing, but it might.