On ONE song on ONE CD, EAC was ripping very slowly ... it was working but error checking or whatever that red box is was running repeatedly with maybe 0.1% of the song being processed each time.
I have watched similar things here - one solution is changing the reading mode of EAC to a less secure one (which is _very_ secure in comparison to other rippers - not including MC, I know it can rip very secure).
Another solution is changing the CD-drive (I have two build into my computer so this is easy) - my dvd-drive (LG) seems to be less tolerant than the cd-burner (TEAC).
Maybe it is helpfull to know that some drives report "c2"-ability but they don't have it, too.
To
"rip to APE first" - yes, encoding is really fast using APE and there is nearly no difference between wave- and ape-ripping. _But_ the decoding of APEs to convert them to mp3 (my hd-space is limited) is very slow - in the end the difference is so much that this is not very practical.
Mirko