I used to use grip (frontend for cdparanoia and lame/oggenc) to rip CDs under Linux. Now that I've decided to keep my music on my windows partition, I use EAC because I want perfect reads. I have an NEC 2510A and have EAC configured pretty much as outlined here (LAME, Secure mode, VBR MP3s, etc):

http://users.pandora.be/satcp/eac02.htm#-

For about 75-80% of my CDs, everything goes fine (no errors). For the other 20-25% of my CDs, I receive errors. Is there any way I can configure EAC to try more than 16x5 times to perform a successful read of a sector before giving up and issuing a read error? Often, if I let it run for long enough, EAC will eventually finish ripping the CD, but obviously it isn't a perfect read if it even encounters one read error. My CDs certainly aren't that scratched - I could see if it encountered errors on a few CDs due to smudges/scratches, but 35-50 or so seems like a lot. Does anybody know if I'm perhaps doing something wrong? If not, can anyone recommend a method/other tool with which to rip these CDs that give errors under EAC? Or is my best bet to just let EAC chug away on the error CDs and just settle for what it reads? When I ran Linux, I only very rarely encountered a non-correctable read error. Is cdparanoia simply better (I've heard that cdparanoia is the best ripper; I've also heard that EAC is) or were my rips not perfect? Thanks for the help.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Revi...=9803&PageId=2
Try another reader - that is a pretty poor result, as the better readers can manage few/no errors on the TCD-726.

The TCD-721R test result is worse at the beginning, but the highest levels of error are less than some drives achieve.

It would seem the NEC is oversensitive to minor defects - the 3/5 rating at level 3 of the final test is also poor.

Do you rip at full speed, medium speed or 1x - many errors disappear at 1x, so if I'm trying to recover a badly scratched CD, I go immediately to 1x.

If EAC hasn't found a >50% match after 5 blasts of 16 tries, it isn't going to.

Try CDEX, some drives give better results with CDEX "paranoia" than they do with EAC "secure" - though EAC wins in auditioning and deglitching the suspect areas.

I've tried configuring EAC for the slowest read speed (4x) but it makes no difference on the read/sync errors. I just bought a copy of CloneCD for making 1:1 copies of CDs (data and audio). I tried ripping a CD that reports many read errors under EAC and CloneCD wrote an image perfectly (at least it didn't report any read errors). I don't understand what the problem is with EAC. I'd like to rip all of my CDs. My friends use iTunes or Musicmatch to rip theirs and they don't get errors. I've heard that these are poor at error checking and that they don't make perfect rips, but EAC can barely rip 3/4 of my CDs without problems. If I leave it running on a scratched CD for many hours, usually it never finishes. Any advice on what I should do to get my CDs ripped? BTW, I use the Nero ASPI layer as suggested in the tutorial - I don't think it makes a difference because I receive read errors with the default layer as well. The adaptec ASPI doesn't work.

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/downloads.php - Try CDEX then, some drives just don't seem to agree with EAC - I had a drive that just would not work properly with it.

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/gfx/ss2.jpg - the ripping method can be changed to "paranoia".