I recently bought an MP3 player and am now in the process of ripping MP3s (actually WMAs) from my CDs.
I remember doing this in the past and the average time it took to rip WMAs from my CDs was only a few minutes. However, now I’m finding that it’s taking over two hours to rip the songs from the CD. Why is it taking so long?
Stats:
AMD 800Mhz machine
384MB RAM
52X CD player
using Windows Media Player 10.
Recently ran Spybot S&D and AdAware to kill any spy/adware on my system.
At this rate, it’s going to take forever to get my CD collection into my player! If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears and would be most appreciative.
There are two things you can do. First, get the world standard in DAE, Exact Audio Copy. It’s freeware. Set it up so that it copies in Secure mode, not Burst. It’s not complicated, and there is facility in the program to rip a CD and convert it to mp3. I recommend the LAME codec. If it isn’t already installed, it is very simple to download, install and point EAC at it for mp3 conversion. And always, always use your CD writer and NOT your CD-ROM drive to read the CD when extracting. Almost without exception, CD-ROM drives are terrible at digital audio extraction. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.
One thing that sped up DVD I/O a ton for me was to enable DMA on the controller. You don’t say whether you have an ATA drive, but I’ll assume you do, and I’ll assume you’re working under Windows XP too.
Right-click on My Computer and choose “Manage”. Go to the Device Manager section of the Computer Management console that comes up. Under the View menu, choose “Devices By Connection”. Dig through the resulting device tree until you find your CDROM drive (Mine is under ACPI Uniprocessor PC -> PCI Bus -> Intel blahblahblah Ultra ATA Storage Controller -> Primary IDE Channel). Once you find it, bring up the properties on its parent (the IDE Channel). In the Advanced Settings tab, there is a Transfer Mode selection for each device on that controller. Try setting this to DMA mode if it’s available. You might have to reboot to see the effect.
My computer was already set up with the configuration you suggested, ntucker, so that isn’t the problem.
The program that you suggested fishbicycle, actually made my system unstable and I had to uninstall it. OTOH, I only have one drive (which is a CD rewritable drive), so that’s the drive I’ve been using.
If you (or anyone else) has any other suggestions, I’m all ears and would be very appreciative.
That could be a possibility. I am low on disk space. In addition, I tried to do a defrag a while back but couldn’t due to lack of disk space. I am in the process of clearing some space up.
Two hours is crazy. It;s got to be a hardware issue or some setting you have mis-set. Drive might be getting progressively out of alignment. CDRW’s are very cheap these days, why not try another one.
Sorry, Zev, if EAC wouldn’t work on your computer, it sounds like a hardware issue and not the program. I haven’t actually encountered a situation where it made an OS unstable, and I’ve used it on all the Windows flavors.
Additionally, if you are so low on drive space that you can’t defrag, that is a problem. And if it takes two hours to extract a CD, that is because the drive is searching and searching for itty bitty spaces to put the music data, all over the disk, wherever it can find a writable block. You really need to have at least 400 MB free just to fit a CD. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to rip a CD, max.
Define “low on disk space”, please. If it is, in fact, quite low, you will start to see all kinds of problems on your system. Windows itself can get a bit crazy if the free space gets less than a certain percentage of the drive’s total capacity (12%, I think). fishbicycle is on to something when it comes to any ripping program needing to work your hard drive like crazy to find some free space to put the audio data… Does your hard drive make lots of noise when you’re trying to rip discs?
if there was way to copy the CD disk image to hard disk and rip it from the hard disk instead of the CD that would point you to correct direction re the flaky CD hardware or low system resources dilemma.
I failed to mention this earlier, but you should verify that the “Current transfer mode” on your ATA channel is actually a DMA mode, not PIO. Just setting the transfer mode to “DMA when available” isn’t necessarily going to change anything if DMA mode isn’t available.
If it’s set to DMA when available, but it’s doing PIO mode, then I’m not sure what to do, but replacing the drive has fixed that problem for me in the past. Drives are cheaper than hours and hours of your time.
I’m not a fan of Windows Media Player. It tends to be a system hog and you’re not exactly overloaded with RAM. I’d try using a dedicated ripper or at least something like Music Match Jukebox that treads lighter on your system and see if that doesn’t help. With MMJB, you can set it to rip directly to your larger partition.
I have almost an identical system as you do and I can rip CD’s in a matter of minutes. I use MMJB also.
Go into Device Manager and right click on your hard drive icon and your cd rom icon (then go to properties) and make sure they all have the “enable DMA” square checked.
Double check that you’re writing to the proper drive/partition also. The one that has 7 G’s of free space.
Here are three more suggestions, pretty much along the lines of what I would do if the problem came about on my system.
Consider freeing some space. It sounds like the hard drive might be getting old and/or worn out. Since the C: drive is pretty full, have you considered moving some of the files on it to CDs? This would give you a chance to benchmark your burner’s performance at burning, and point out whether it’s the hard drive or the burner that’s causing you grief.
Check to ensure that your swap file is on the partition with the free space! Windows is doubtless thrashing the swap throughout the process, and if that’s on the full drive – and if your swap file is fragmented – then you could experience serious slowdowns. To fix this, defrag whichever drive doesn’t have the swap file on it, then change Windows’ settings to use that drive for swap. Defrag the swapless drive, and then, if necessary, change the settings again and move the swap file back. If you can safely do so, slice off 1GB of the 7GB free on D: and designate it S: or P: (swap or pagefile drive). Windows’ native defrag utility is crap at defragging the swap file, which slows down all HDD- and RAM-intensive operations.
Check your BIOS settings at your next reboot. Some BIOSes will be overly conservative – or naive – about the capabilities of the CD-ROM drives installed. Make sure your BIOS is detecting that the drive is ATA-100 (or whatever) capable. You sound reasonably savvy, but just in case: most systems will let you edit the BIOS settings by pressing “Del” during the first part of the boot process. If you can’t get the BIOS to see your CD/R’s traits properly, then the OS won’t either; consider updating your BIOS and CD/R firmware.
If you can tell us what your motherboard is and who makes your drive, I can dig around for hardware incompatibilities.
Can you change the rip destination to your D drive? Ripping them to the nearly-full C drive and then moving them doesn’t sound like a great idea, Windows likes to have room to move and the 300ish meg left over once you’ve ripped an entire CD is pushing it a bit. Do try to free up as much space as possible on the C drive.
700MB worth of free space on a 30GB partition with Windows on it won’t cut it. I too suggest that you rip directly to D: instead of C:. I also suggest using a quality ripper and encoder (like EAC or CDEx) instead of “all in one” ripper\players like MMJB or WMP. MMJB and WMP does a decent job or most things, but pretty crappy jobs of the most important thing: ripping discs.
