Does anyone have experience with this problem? I have a computer that I would like to be able to use for ripping and encoding CDs. The problem is that on a lot (about half) of the CDs I have tried it has issues reading the final track on the CD and the ripped wave file gets bigger and bigger until it fills the drive or I cancel it. All other tracks rip fine. The machine is running FreeBSD and I have tried ripping with cdparanoia and dagrab. I have had this problem ever since I built the computer about two years ago. It has persisted through at least 3 versions of FreeBSD so I doubt it is an OS bug. My gut feeling is that I have a faulty CDROM drive (it is some generic drive that was cheap when I built the computer), but it seems to work perfectly fine for everything except ripping. Before I buy another drive does anybody have any other suggestions on what it could be?

-Mike

I'd certainly suspect the drive. Can't you get your hands on another drive to swap out to test against?

Also... Remember that some CD-ROM drives... (well, mostly burners actually) have firmware that can be upgraded if you go to the mfr's web site. Maybe it just needs that.

Since it's presumably a WAV file you're getting from the rip, have you even tried playing it?

I saw this problem on a Linux box years ago, but I don't remember details.

I've seen cdparanoia rip very slowly on a single track sometimes, not always the last.

I didn't know cdparanoia was available for FreeBSD. I wonder if it's as hackish as my Solaris cdparanoia port, that works fine but I haven't maintained in like 3 or 4 years.

Since it's presumably a WAV file you're getting from the rip, have you even tried playing it?

I don't think I have ever bothered to try. I'd check, but oddly enough it is now working on a CD that failed a couple of days ago. Strange.

I didn't know cdparanoia was available for FreeBSD.

Yeah, it is a recent port. I think it was just done in the last month or two. I was surprised to see it actually as I thought cdparanoia was supposed to be very linux-centric. Now I just need somebody to do an OS X port as I don't really trust iTunes for ripping.

I doubt the recent port has anything to do with my problem though as it does that same thing with dagrab which has been around on FreeBSD for quite a while.

-Mike

Can't you get your hands on another drive to swap out to test against?

Well, I don't have another one laying around outside of a computer. I could borrow the one out of my Mac I guess. Of course now I seem to be having the problem of it not happening everytime on the same CD so it will be hard to test.

Remember that some CD-ROM drives... (well, mostly burners actually) have firmware that can be upgraded if you go to the mfr's web site. Maybe it just needs that.

Yeah, I tried that. The drive is apparently a Genica BCD E520C, but I don't see anything on the manufacturer's site that implies it is upgradable.

-Mike

I was surprised to see it actually as I thought cdparanoia was supposed to be very linux-centric.

It is. Or more correctly, the Linux-specific parts aren't split out nicely from the other stuff.

Next time I see Monty I should ask what happened to "cdparanoia 10", which when I offered the Solaris patches originally he implied was "in progress". Then they got busy with Ogg. Can't really complain about that.

Next time I see Monty

Why is it that every high profile linux geek seems to be not more than one or two steps removed from somebody on this BBS We've got The Linux IDE Guy (tm) and LT and AC through him, you apparently know the Xiph guys, RMS has made an appearance. Where are all the BSD people damn it ;-)

-Mike

Why is it that every high profile linux geek seems to be not more than one or two steps removed from somebody on this BBS

Oh, uh, on my last trip to Boston I had dessert one evening with Ted T'so so we could talk about some filesystem stuff

We've got The Linux IDE Guy (tm) and LT and AC through him

Alan Cox would be so much more my hero if we got the system call hook we (OpenAFS) needed, already...

Where are all the BSD people damn it

As far as BSD people, uh, well, I see mycroft occasionally, but I don't know him particularly well. Next week I expect to see Love Hörnquist-Åstrand, but he's probably not very high profile, BSD-wise. I know Robert Watson from when he was a student at CMU. Not all "Linux people" hate "BSD people" or vice-versa.

It's not hard to meet "high-profile" geeks, either. USENIX is a good place to go. For that matter, if you look carefully over who's posted here, there are several people who have done notable geeky things over the years that don't seem to have gotten notice for such. I won't flush them out, but I do assure you they're here. (Or they were, at some point.)

That said, I think I met Monty the first time by submitting a bug report on cdparanoia, then telling him I could meet him in the SIPB office at MIT where he was welcome to play with the drive.

Incidentally I see I still have the Solaris port I did (uses the CDROMCDDA ioctl Solaris provides, something I sorely wish Linux had, but it requires usermode DMA to be useful), if anyone wants it I can probably drop it somewhere, but it's from 1998, and I think it lacked polish when I did it...

For that matter, I wonder if I ever started distributing the Linux-capable CDDA version of Workman, or if not, where the source went...

if you look carefully over who's posted here, there are several people who have done notable geeky things over the years

Yep, I know there are a bunch that I missed. The collective brain power floating around this BBS is pretty amazing.

Not all "Linux people" hate "BSD people" or vice-versa.

Of course not, and there is a fair amount of overlap. The religious wars are fun though

And slightly back to the original topic is it normal with cdparanoia to get some uncorrectable errors? I seem to be getting a couple per track on a cd that is in pretty good shape. I am thinking this may be another sign that it is time to get a better drive.

-Mike

Where are all the BSD people damn it

One of my friends is fairly close to the Core team...

Weak laser, maybe? I wouldn't expect that unless it was attached to a piece of media, or the drive was defective in a way that interfered with reading.

Well, it is definitely the drive. I swapped in the cdrom drive from my mac and it works perfectly. Gets the last track without a problem and cdparanoia shows no errors on the couple of discs I have tried (no jitter correction even). I guess this is a good excuse for me to pick up the CDRW+DVD drive I have been wanting for my mac and just leave the mac's cd drive in my freebsd box. Thanks for the help guys.

-Mike

What kind of drive should we be avoiding?

What kind of drive should we be avoiding?

Well, FreeBSD claims it is a Genica BCD E520C. The drive itself is basically unlabeled. It was a supper cheapy bare drive that I got from Fry's or someplace like that. As usual, you get what you pay for.

-Mike