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[lalittle]

MC has always had drive speed settings for CD/DVD RW drives, but so far I've never personally used a drive where the MC setting had any effect.  I try to slow down the drive to prevent "Unreliable" reads when ripping, but the drive ignores this setting and just rips the same speed it does when set to "max."  I run into more and more "problem" CDs these days ("unreliable" rip reports), so I'd be interested in hearing about any drive where I can slow down the rip speed in MC.  I've found in the past that if the drive slows down a bit, the rip has a much lower chance of problem reads.

Thanks,

Larry

[JimH]

You should use "secure" rip for this rather than drive speed.

[lalittle]

You should use "secure" rip for this rather than drive speed.

I DO use secure rip -- always.  I always thought that if I wasn't using "Secure," I wouldn't know about the "Unreliable" read reports since the rip reports are only generated when using "Secure."

There are two different settings.  The "Copy Mode" setting is where you choose "Secure," but there is also a "Read Speed," where you choose Max, 1x, 2x, etc.  What I'm saying is that MC's "Speed" setting has no effect.  As a test, I even tried temporarily setting the Copy Mode to "Normal," but the speed setting still had no effect.  I've noticed that when the drive speed slows down, the re-reads and "unreliable" reports go away.  Unfortunately, the drive only slows down when the disc is REALLY bad.  If the disc has just a few problem spots, the 16 attempts take place before the drive slows down, so there is no way of getting a "slower" read of that spot.  This is why I'm asking about drives that will obey the MC read speed setting.

Is it possible that MC's read speed setting could be made to work with other drives (I'm using Pioneer at the moment)?  I've actually never seen the MC "read speed" setting have any effect on the different drives I've used over the last few years.  I'm not sure if this is something that certain drives just won't allow, or if certain drives are controlled in different ways, and that MC could potentially control the speed on these drives as well (I've used Pioneer, Plextor, and one or two others.)

There was actually some discussion of this a couple years ago.  As systems and drives have gotten faster and faster, reliability of rips has gone down.  I believe that this is largely due to the fact that the drive never has a chance to slow down for MC's 16 retries.  I've always wondered if this could be alleviated by greatly increasing MC's number of retries -- i.e. I wonder if repeated attempts to re-read the same spot would cause the drive to automatically slow down.

Note that ALL of these problems are on brand NEW CDs that appear to be in pristine condition.  Note also that the issue has persisted over multiple different drives and systems over the years, so it's not unique to any particular drives and/or systems.

I found this post from JohnT from back in May of 2008 responding to the exact same issue I'm bringing up now:

I found a problem with our CD rip speed setting. In some cases the speed would get reset to maximum after ripping the first track at a user selected speed. Please try the next build (429?) to see if works better for you.

Was this ever followed up on?  The issue never went away for me, and I'm using completely different systems now.

Thanks,

Larry