Some possible problems I'm Having with EAC . . .

[Seeker47]

O.K., I guess this is "Audio Help" rather than Video Help . . .
And I will do my best to provide enough info for this to be useful.

Burner in question is a Pioneer 111D internal -- a spare unit with lower service hours. Latest versions of EAC and ImgBurn. I haven't used EAC in quite some time, and that was an earlier version. Starting to wonder if it might have been a mistake to update it, or if the burner may be entering a state of intermittent failure. Most of this involves backing up a bunch of music CDs I own (yes, I'm one of the diminishing minority that still buys music CDs), as I would rather not subject the originals to possible loss or damage on road trips.

Basically, I keep getting certain errors. A common one with EAC goes "Blocks Writing. Logical Unit is Not Ready. (something something) Long Write." (And Yes, there was a Cue Sheet made.) The disc spins, I can leave for an hour and come back to find the disc still spinning. A 24X burn should have taken a fraction of this time. So I abort the procedure. The disc shows as having "X" number of .CDA tracks on it, but they do not play. Something is very wrong here, or I don't know something crucial, or have forgotten too much about how you make these backups. The tracks ripping phase of it has mostly worked, although sometimes the gap detection has been so glacially slow in the Cue Sheet phase that I have to think something has hung and I abort it. I have other programs that can make Cue Sheets.

An EAC Settings screen advises not to enable the 'Spin Drive Up First' setting, for most cases, so I didn't.

In one recent trial, the Pio 111D totally froze up and became completely unresponsive -- as if it was electrically dead. I had to use the old paperclip routine, and pry the tray out to remove the disc. At that point, I thought maybe the drive was experiencing intermittent failures, and then just died. But I rebooted, it was responding again, and I was able to make some DVDs with it. Hmmm ??

What I've been doing since is still doing the rips with EAC, then making a Cue Sheet and burning the backup with IB. This has generally been more successful, although I think I have run into the occasional error with IB as well. I'll try to make better note of that. My recollection, though, is that an older version of EAC used to be a much more reliable "one stop shop" for this. Do I need to revisit some program guides, or is there an easier way to do this ?

Evaluation of how acceptable the backups I've been making are will have to wait until I get a chance to play them in the car's player. (I'm not sure that playing them on the computer with some desktop player is the best test.)

[hech54]

If you are simply copying the entire disc....just have ImgBurn create an ISO image, the burn with ImgBurn.

[jman98]

This doesn't really help you with your problem, but I'll throw it out there any way. Earlier this year I built a new PC with an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T CPU running Win 7 64 bit. My previous PC was an older single core AMD Sempron 3200+ CPU that ran 32 bit Windows XP. My rips with EAC on my new PC are significantly longer than on the older XP PC. Roughly twice as long. Are you running Win 7 64 bit too? I am wondering if EAC just runs slower under 64 bit Windows. My drives on the new PC are good quality drives but EAC usually shows itself ripping around 1-2x, which is terrible. I wasn't getting great speeds on my previous PC, but they were usually 4x or better. I do not use EAC ever for burning nor do I recommend that you do so. You should use ImgBurn to burn instead.

[Seeker47]

@jman98,

Thanks for that report. I'm still using 32-bit XP.


@hech54,

So, ImgBurn won't have issues with whatever DRM may be on commercial music CDs ? (I think Nero or most other such Windows programs probably do, however I'm aware of a couple non-Windows CD / DVD app.s that do not.) And IB images would duplicate the gaps between tracks ? If so, I will certainly try this.

[hech54]

So, ImgBurn won't have issues with whatever DRM may be on commercial music CDs ? (I think Nero or most other such Windows programs probably do, however I'm aware of a couple non-Windows CD / DVD app.s that do not.) .

I've personally only come across one audio CD that has given me problems as far as copy protections.

And IB images would duplicate the gaps between tracks ? If so, I will certainly try this.

It will be an exact copy, Gaps, no gaps, whatever.