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[marko]

I can't play audio cds with this build either. Details and log file available on request.

[JohnT]

So you can see the list of tracks on the Cd. Can you rip them? Does the problem occur on both cd drives?

[marko]

The list of tracks is visible, yes.

Neither drive will play an audio CD

Can I rip them? Deary me...

So, I first tried with a single disc in drive Q, and it ripped fine.
During that rip, I popped another disc into drive R...
MC updated the rip list with the new tracks, but upon finishing the first disc, it did not rip the second.
The action window asked me to insert another disc or close the rip window.
I opened both drives and closed them again, MC became unresponsive for a long time, then began ripping the second disc.
It ripped one track, then failed. The action window looked like so:


I restarted MC and tried again.
When I hit 'Rip' in the action window, I got this:

There are only 26 tracks to be ripped across 2 CDs.

I restarted MC and tried again.
MC is set to use two ripping processes. A track from each disc began ripping...
After a few seconds, the progress indicators in the file list disappeared, the action window was still updating.
Upon checking the file location, I could see that drive Q was still ripping, but drive R had hung and was doing nothing.
I aborted the rip.

I also noted that the rip is far from smooth, once, it ripped 3 tracks in quick succession, reaching the heady speed of 22x, the norm is for it to rip at 3x, and I hear the drive spin down after each track, then there's a long pause before the drive spins back up and the next track begins ripping.
Matt always says try to keep things simple...
I opened my AV software and added the rip location to the exclusion list.
I opened MC and changed the rip settings to use one process and not to analyse audio during rip.
I tried again.
Same results as above, only now, MC absolutely refuses to rip from drive R, giving me various flavours of these during the first track:



Usually, after a failure, then retrying, the rip window was void of any text:


Leaving MC open after the final failure, I opened WMP and asked it to rip the same disc in the same drive, which it did without any fuss, and without spinning the drive down during the rip.

Media Center 13.0.160 Registered -- C:\Program Files\Media Center 13\

Microsoft Windows XP 5.1 Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Intel Core 2 2666 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 2095 MB, Free - 1110 MB

Internet Explorer: 8.0.6001.18702 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82.2900 / Shlwapi.dll: 6.0.2900 / Shell32.dll: 6.0.2900 / wnaspi32.dll: N/A
Ripping /   Drive Q: TDK     DVDRW1616N        Mode:Normal  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Drive R: TDK     DVDRW0404N        Mode:Normal  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Digital playback: Yes /  Get cover art: Yes /  Calc replay gain: No /  Copy volume: 32767
  Eject after ripping: Yes /  Play sound after ripping: No 

Burning /  Drive Q: TDK      DVDRW1616N         Addr: 5:0:0  Speed:48  MaxSpeed:48  BurnProof:Yes
  Drive R: TDK      DVDRW0404N         Addr: 5:1:0  Speed:16  MaxSpeed:16  BurnProof:Yes
  Test mode: No /  Eject after writing: Yes /  Direct decoding: Yes /  Write CD-Text: Yes
  Use playback settings: No /

Portable Device Info
  Removed devices: USBDISKPRO (L:),CANON_DC (J:)


Interface Plugins:
  last.fm (Active)
  Library Server
  TiVo Server
  UPnP Server
  Playing Now

-marko.

Note: Same problems with build 161.

[marko]

Same issues here with build 163.

I changed the rip encoder from flac to wav, drive R still fails:


Take the disc from R, insert into Q, rip to wav is successful, though painfully, painfully slow, with a long pause and drive spindown after each track.

Is there anything else you want me to try here?

-marko.

[JimH]

Try another drive?

[marko]

Try another drive?

Take the disc from R, insert into Q, rip to wav is successful, though painfully, painfully slow, with a long pause and drive spindown after each track.

Playback won't happen from either drive, but does work from WMP.

-marko.

[Alex B]

can't play any audio cd with current MC

I have no idea of what is causing the problem, but have you tried an older version? For instance, MC12 or MJ12.

It might be a good to know if the problem exists only in MC13 when trying to solve it.

[JimH]

Are you closing the disk when you burn?

[marko]

When this first came to light, I'd used MC to burn an audio CD. When burning an audio CD with MC, the option to leave the disc open is not given.

MC burned that disc just fine, then ejected the tray, then closed the tray, then fell over when I asked it to play the disc it had just burned.
That same disc that MC had just created played just fine using either my Hi-Fi or WMP.

From that point forward, all testing has been performed on retail audio cds.

I will make time to try some older builds/versions of MC and post my findings.

-marko.

[Mr ChriZ]

Is CD digital playback turned on?
I tried turning it off on mine and MC came up with an error stating it was unable to play the files.
With digital turned on MC played the CD Fine.

[marko]

"Use digital playback of audio CDs" is enabled, yes.

Get coverart was selected too. I turned that off and tried again... another failure.

[JimH]

I just tested.  I can play an audio CD.  Have you installed any software that does anything special with the drives?

[marko]

I've not installed anything new here in ages, apart from last week when I installed the Cyberlink YouCam software that came with my new monitor with incorporated webcam, and Skype.
I use Daemon tools virtual drive software too, but have done so for, well, forever, and I've not updated it in years. For the record, for the purposes of trouble shooting this problem, I did disable Daemon Tools and all MC plugins.

It's wierd, because as soon as MC fails to play, without doing anything else, I can open up WMP and it plays the same audio cd in the same drive, without a hitch.
Something, somewhere is tripping MC up.

I take it there are no clues in any of the logs I've provided?

I will try a few more things to try and narrow this down over the next couple of days.

-marko.

[JohnT]

Unfortunately the log files didn't have any information about the problem, and I haven't been able to reproduce the CD playback problem here on the several computers that I've tried. Let me know any other data points you collect on this and we'll keep digging here.

John

[lalittle]

I tested my system, and CD's play fine with version 164.

Is the issue perhaps related to having two drives on the system?  I'm just trying to think of differences between Marko's system and other systems.  Did the systems tested at JR have two drives?

Marko -- This is an "at your own risk" suggestion, but one thing that you "might" want to try would be to delete the CD/DVD drives and/or controllers (i.e. the IDE/SATA "channels") from the Device Manager and re-boot windows to let it find and re set-up everything again.  I've seen issues in the past where this solved various glitches with drives, including slow access/burn times.  I've seen my IDE channels get switched to non DMA mode before, at which point the only solution was to delete the channels and let windows set them up again.  Note that this could have side effects, like switching drive letters around and so forth, so once again, this is an "at your own risk" suggestion.

Larry

[marko]

Thanks for the suggestion larry.
I will try that, but not before I've exhausted any other avenues I can think of.

Burning questions (pardon the pun) for me are:

Surely, if WMP can play the CD, MC should too?
Surely, if WMP can rip the CD, MC should too?
What about those wierd failure messages that MC is producing... is that external or coming from MC code?
I'm planning on installing EAC and DbPoweramp and testing with those. Where do we stand if out of four applications, MC is the only one that has trouble with my drives?
Why me?


-marko

On a lighter note, I expect to take delivery of my new tocco ultra sometime today... 'toys for the boys' and all that

[JimH]

Surely, if WMP can play the CD, MC should too?
Surely, if WMP can rip the CD, MC should too?

Not if you've got some special software playing around with the drive.  It may have been tested with WMP and not MC, or it may step aside for WMP.

If MC were having general trouble playing audio CD's, we'd hear a lot about it.  We're not.  Sorry.  At this point, I don't think you're seeing an MC problem.

Nice job scoring the phone though.

[JohnT]

Do you know if MC ever ripped ok on your machine? Would it be possible for you to try installing an older MC build to see if we can pinpoint the version that broke it?

Thanks!
John

[marko]

Do you know if MC ever ripped ok on your machine? Would it be possible for you to try installing an older MC build to see if we can pinpoint the version that broke it?

Thanks!
John

The last time I ripped a CD was with MC13.0.140 and it worked flawlessly. MC has always been a flawless ripper for me.

I installed build 140 over the top of the most recent beta and asked it to rip the disc from the right click menu on the drive, and MC locked hard on me with a busy cursor and the menu showing, and the same when trying to play. I used task manager to close MC.

I installed EAC and Meda Monkey, now, they could both play the CD, but both failed to rip, requiring to be end tasked also. WMP continues to rip and play without missing a beat. All very strange indeed.

I'm out of time for this morning, but will continue digging over the coming days.

-marko.

[leezer3]

Odd, haven't ever seen anything like this.
Only thought is whether this could be an issue with secure ripping- As far as I know, both EAC and Media Monkey use this, but WMP doesn't.

Cheers

-Leezer-

[JimH]

Try uninstalling any software that accesses the drive.  The ISO thing, for example.

[marko]

Well, this is just plain wierd! (and the older I get, the more I dislike trouble shooting)

I went through add/remove proggies systematically removing anything that could possibly be interested in my optical drives... nothing. MC failed every time.

I installed the oldest MC13 I have here (13.0.084) which still didn't work.
I installed MC12, which didn't work either.
I used device mangler to uninstall all optical drives, all HDDs, all SATA/RAID controllers, rebooted, waited an age for windows to sort itself out, rebooted again... still didn't work.
I reinstalled the MoBo SATA/RAID drivers... still didn't work.

Getting hacked off, I imaged the drive and restored a disk image I took way back when XP was a fresh install and everything was working peachy, and yup, you guessed it, it still didn't work.

Surely it can't be a hardware issue? though these drives are getting on a bit now....

I downloaded the 64bit RC of Windows Seven and, wait for it, WOOHOO!! Everything worked a treat. I got sidetracked here for quite some time as I then proceeded to mess around with this new OS. Rather nice, isn't it?
Then I had a word with myself to stop time wasting, and went for a clean install of XP, and so far, with every available windows update, MC, AV Directory Opus and not much else installed, it's still working.

I'm not happy though.
I still don't know what is wrong here, therefore, I don't no how to prevent it re-occurring.
I can't think of any other trouble shooting steps to follow...

I presume that MC can read the drive contents, as it lists and labels the tracks, and retrieves album art for said album, but it can't rip and won't play. A new development here was the appearance of an MC "Analyzing Devices" dialogue halfway through the first track failing to play.
WMP continues to function correctly in all it's interaction with my optical drives.

Many, many moons ago, I had a problem where, after uninstalling a CD burning app, all my optical drives vanished from "My Computer". The fix here, was to locate some registry entries to do with "filters" ?? and delete them. This simple act returned the drives to normality.
Could something similar be going on here? I'm not sure, it was a long (maybe 8 years ago or more) time ago, and I have not recently uninstalled any burning software. Also, I can't find mention of those elusive registry keys any more.

All that's left as far as my limited vision goes, is to reinstall my apps, testing as I go to see if any one of them breaks things.
This is something I'd rather not do unless I really have to.

Why on earth would the old, supposedly good, XP disk image exhibit the same behaviour?
I know for a fact that I've ripped many a CD since taking that image, and there's never been a problem with those.

Those weird MC failure messages bug me too. Where are they coming from, and do the heiroglyphics mean anything to anyone?

This couldn't be a viral thing, could it?

Too strange for me.

-marko.

[JimH]

Here's a guess from an ancient person who has had his share of hardware problems.  Probably meaningless.

I'm putting 2 cents on the cause being Windows setting the drive into PIO mode.  The reason it worked with WMP is that Microsoft knows a way around PIO.

[marko]

* marko is listeng to: 'Love Sick' by 'Bob Dylan' from the album 'Time Out of Mind' [Duration: 5:21 | 1440 kbps cda (54.0 MB) | rated ? stars/5 | played 7 times ~ last played 14:11 ago  (11/05/09)

Gotta dash, back with details in the morning

[lalittle]

Here's a guess from an ancient person who has had his share of hardware problems.  Probably meaningless.

I'm putting 2 cents on the cause being Windows setting the drive into PIO mode.  The reason it worked with WMP is that Microsoft knows a way around PIO.

That's similar to what I was saying above -- i.e. that I've seen drives get set to "non DMA" mode (which I believe would be PIO), and that this was solved by deleting the IDE channel that the drive was on and letting Windows re-find it on boot up.  I've had to do this once in a while over the years.  Apparently what happens is that once Windows records a certain number of "events" on an IDE channel, it forces the channel out of DMA mode.  Based on what I've read, I believe that this can potentially happen even if the problem is due to bad disks and not the drive itself.  Once this happens, the only way to "reset" it is to delete the channel, at which point windows starts the count over again. 

Larry

[marko]

See that red text in my previous post? See the underlined, bold bit?

That's similar to what I was saying above -- i.e. that I've seen drives get set to "non DMA" mode (which I believe would be PIO), and that this was solved by deleting the IDE channel that the drive was on and letting Windows re-find it on boot up.  I've had to do this once in a while over the years.  Apparently what happens is that once Windows records a certain number of "events" on an IDE channel, it forces the channel out of DMA mode.  Based on what I've read, I believe that this can potentially happen even if the problem is due to bad disks and not the drive itself.  Once this happens, the only way to "reset" it is to delete the channel, at which point windows starts the count over again. 

Larry

And I did that...

I used device mangler to uninstall all optical drives, all HDDs, all SATA/RAID controllers, rebooted, waited an age for windows to sort itself out, rebooted again... still didn't work.

After that, I tried reinstalling the SATA/RAID drivers that came with the motherboard, which still didn't work.

I was running out of ideas.
If it worked with a clean windows Seven or XP install, why not now?
It can't be hardware because it works there, and works fine here with WMP...
MC12 won't work. MC12 always worked. Period.
Something has to have changed in Windows... but what?

I took a screenshot of device manager and switched images to compare the two....
And there it was, so obvious (isn't it always once the lights come)....

Windows had decided for some wierd and wonderful reason known only to itself, that my optical drives were of the SCSI variety rather than the IDE variety that they actually are!!

Having already tried removing the devices only to have them reinstalled as SCSI drives, and reinstalling the SATA/RAID stuff hadn't helped either, I reinstalled the "INF Updates"
According to the blurb, INF updates: "This utility installs INF files that inform the operating system how to properly configure the chipset for specific functionality such as PCI-Express or USB interface."
There doesn't seem to be anything 'drive related' in there, but what the heck, I've tried everything else....
The install took less than three seconds, from a CDRom in one of the poorly configured drives, followed by a reboot.

That was all it took. Job done. No more SCSI drives and back to business as usual.
I've no idea how I came to have SCSI drives. Very strange. But there you go.

Thank you to all who offered tips and moral support during this blip, it's appreciated.

-marko.