DVD Writer recommendations wanted

[EtheAv8r]

I am quite tempted by the Pioneer, I must admit, as I have an older Pioneer 8x drive already which sometimes read disks where my NEC drive failed, but even it struggles sometimes. The best drive I ever had for reading dodgy CD's was a Sony CD-RW drive, although that struggles to read DVD's, never mind write to them!

I use Exact Audio Copy to rip my discs, but even so some of them fail to rip (they came out of the bargain bucket in HMV, so I didn't see the point in taking them back as they play OK in a CD player).

Cheers,
Stephen

In this situation I use an audio CD writer to make a copy of the CD on my HiFi and then use that copy in the PC to rip to my iPod. Kinda expensive if you don't already have an audio CD copier though.

[fat jez]

Hi Guys,

Based on what I read on CD Freaks, I went for the Samsung SH-S203B, which is basically a 20x SATA DVD writer. It handled my test disc fairly well in terms of audio extraction, slowing down considerably but not failing and Accuraterip was happy with the produced files!

Cheers for the help and suggestions!

Stephen

[silentvoice]

Based on what I read on CD Freaks, I went for the Samsung SH-S203B, which is basically a 20x SATA DVD writer. It handled my test disc fairly well in terms of audio extraction, slowing down considerably but not failing and Accuraterip was happy with the produced files!

That's not unusual. If it's a heavily scratched CD, it can take hours to rip!

Plus EAC is a lot more intensive than most programs. I believe it reads each audio sector twice by default but if it contains a C2 error, this increases to 16 times. If this returns unsatisfactory results, it will then scan the sector up tp 80 times (assuming 'Error recovery quality' is set to 'high'). A single scratch can span many sectors so you can appreciate how long the rip could take!

If you do end up with a read error, it'll list the exact point(s) at the end of the extraction and give you the choice of playing those sectors - the chances are it will sound perfect anyway, unless you had a very deep scratch or something.

Also, make sure you have the software set up for the best settings. If you haven't already you may want to have a look at the following:

- EAC Manual (A bit out of date but still some useful info - especially regarding setup)

- EAC Drive Configuration (Setup info with references to the above site regarding specific settings / configuration).