Is there a way to keep the encoder ripping at a consistent speed, rather than it resetting after every track? On my it will get up to 12x on each track, but then resets and has to build up again.
Don't be distracted by the "buildup". It's caused by 2 things:
1) The CD Drive will read faster as it progresses and will usually read the last part of the last track the fastest
2) At the beginning of the track, there are fewer samples from which to calculate the speed so the speed appears to be building up when it's just really just the calculation getting more accurate.
Don't forget, ripping and encoding are 2 separate things. Rip speed is a function of the CD Drive, the IDE channel (DMA mode?), the condition of the CD, and the error correction mode (Digital Secure vs Digital Large Buffer). Encoding speed is determined by the encoder settings (quality, bitrate, etc) and the amount of CPU resources available.
To accurately judge ripping speeds, rip to uncomressed wave in both Digital Large Buffer and Digital Secure modes and compare. If you want to see how fast the encoder will run by itself, use the convert function to convert the wave files just ripped to mp3.