Ripping/Conversion question (WMA lossless/VBR MP3)

I purchased RipNAS Essentials on Sunday; I saw that it was available from an article at We Got Served, and bought it. It was really a no-brainer; the RipNAS essentials product is well thought out and well implemented.

The software installed on my homebrew WHS machine via the console without error. I can rip to WAV effortlessly, repeatedly, and without error. However, when I switch to a compressed format (I have only tried WMA lossless and VBR mp3), I am not able able to rip a cd without errors. If I were to approximate, I would say that 1 in 10 cd's rips successfully, the other cd rips result in an unplayable track of a small file size being written for the failed track. The log reports that there are wma/mp3 conversion errors and these errors occur for differing tracks each time the same disk is ripped (i.e. no particular "trouble" tracks). For WMA, I have selected WMA 10-->WMA Lossless 9.1 (it is the only option available for lossless; I assume this is correct), 44 kHZ, 16-bit 2-channel.

I would be more than happy to provide any information that could aid in the diagnosing of my problem. I am very excited about this product and would love to be a part of helping it grow.

I have seen this on an ATOM system, with WMA Lossless only (not mp3). Wehave to code around it for the RipNAS hardware device as that is ATOM. What is happening? I have never seen the WMA encoder fail before, I think it is a strange play of the ATOM and its virtual 2 cores that are causing the problem (because WMA is the only encoder to auto split encodings acrosss all CPUs). The simple fix is to use WMA with the Mulit Encoder (even with only 1 encoder such as wma) and add a DSP effect 'Non-Live' which makes the encoding happen after ripping not during the ripping. Give it a try.

I am suprised to hear that mp3 is also causing the issue, can you post a log file for a mp3 encoding.

Good stuff, Spoon; thanks for the response.

As you suggested, I changed my encoder to the Multi Encoder, selected the same WMA parameters as before (WMA10-->WMA 9.1 Lossless, 44kHz, 16-bit 2 channel) and added the Force Non-Live DSP Effect. The result is as you expected, the cd's rip and encode without error (however, I still end up with small unplayable files occasionally being written; the difference is that there is no logging of this (i.e. the log states 'Complete' for the track)). I would like to figure out what is going on with those.

For your edification, here is a sample log for the failed WMA encodes that were occurring without the Force Non-Live fix enabled:
[CODE]Disc 1: [AMG] Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin Reject 1: Ripping Error
Error ripping to Windows Media Audio 10, 'Track 1' to 'D:\shares\Music\Led Zeppelin\Led Zeppelin\Led Zeppelin - 01 - Good Times Bad Times.wma'
Error Compressing to WMA [clEncoder::OutputThisBlock]
Track 1 Result: Error
Track 2 Result: Complete
Track 3 Result: Complete
Track 4 Result: Complete
Track 5 Result: Complete
Track 6 Result: Complete
Track 7 Result: Complete
Track 8 Result: Complete
Track 9 Result: Complete
Combined Result: 1 Error[/CODE]

And, as requested, here is a sample log for the failed MP3 encodes that were occurring without the Force Non-Live fix enabled:
[CODE]Disc 5: [AMG] Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin Reject 5: Ripping Error
Error ripping to mp3 (Lame), 'Track 2' to 'D:\shares\Music\Led Zeppelin\Led Zeppelin\Led Zeppelin - 02 - Babe I'm Gonna Leave You.mp3'
Error writing audio data to StdIn Pipe [clEncoder::EncodeBlock]
Error ripping to mp3 (Lame), 'Track 9' to 'D:\shares\Music\Led Zeppelin\Led Zeppelin\Led Zeppelin - 09 - How Many More Times.mp3'
Error writing audio data to StdIn Pipe [clEncoder::EncodeBlock]
Track 1 Result: Complete
Track 2 Result: Error
Track 3 Result: Complete
Track 4 Result: Complete
Track 5 Result: Complete
Track 6 Result: Complete
Track 7 Result: Complete
Track 8 Result: Complete
Track 9 Result: Error
Combined Result: 2 Error[/CODE]

For the record, my homebrew WHS is an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with 1GB of RAM.

That rules out the ATOM as the cause...

I will spend some time this week investigating the issue (the errors are very strange, the WMA error is in the encoder, where the call to encode a block of data is failling, in the WMA system libraries, for mp3 it seems different again, the encoder has perhaps quit, not sure why it would prematurely...if I had to guess at the reasons it would be something in Windows Home Server, perhaps at the disk writing stage. The Ripper is bascially dBpoweramp R13 which has many 10'000's of users who have never had this issue).

Wonderful; thanks for looking into this. I also was thinking that it might have something to do with how WHS is accessing the disk(s) for writes.

I would be happy to run any tests or provide any additional information that is needed.

It is early in the testing but with one brand of HDD there are errors, with another there are not (same software)...I have to confirm this, but it leads me to believe there might be disk writing issues when the IO system is 'stressed', ie data from a CD and HDD writing. It is good there is a work around, but is not 100% ideal.

The hardware did not seem to play a part in the end, I can get the error using any HDD.

The problem is a failing disk write, a quick fix to the WMA encoder is to add a loop when trying to write to the disk, the next try always seems to work...now this is a fundamental problem it seems with WHS under specific loading (of CPU and disc IO subsystem) and the WMA fix cannot be done in all codecs, such as lame as it is not practical to recompile lame with retries on every filewrite in Lame. I am in discussions with MS about it, but do not expect anything quick out of this.

Very interesting, Spoon; I greatly appreciate the diligence on your part.

Please keep me informed if you get any cooperation from MS on this matter. For the time being I will continue to user the Multi Encoder workaround that you proposed.

Also, do you think that this disk writing issue could also be attributable to the situation that I am still having where a track is ripped/converted without error, but the resulting file is an unplayable 18kb file? Just wondering.

Not sure what is happening there...

WMA fix now released:

[url]http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?p=83044*post83044[/url]

Thank you very much for the new version Spoon (1.1); it does appear to have fixed the issue with WMA.

I have installed the new version on a WHS with German language version. But I still have some CD with ripping errors. And I can't view the error messages. Is this a problem of the German version?

dimp3

Which audio format(s) are you writing to?

Error should appear in the main page and also in the 'view log' section, they do not?