I tried to rip a CD today for the first time in a while, and EAC says "No audio CD in drive." If I go to the configuration wizard, it tells me "EAC couldn't find a CD in the drive to be tested. Make sure a CD containing audio tracks is inserted in the drive named on the top of the dialog. Please try again or go back to the previous screen."

There IS an audio CD in the drive. If I go to Control Panel and in the AutoPlay defaults tell it to "Open folder to view files using Windows Explorer" the CDA files are there, and if I click on one of them it plays.

If, on the other hand I set the autoplay option to my usual setting ("Take No Action") and open up Windows Explorer and click on my H: drive (dvd/cd RW) I get a message "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel."

In neither mode does EAC recognize that there is an audio CD in the drive. If I put a DVD in the drive, it autoplays with no problems.

The system is (regrettably) Windows Vista Ultimate. I have ripped dozens of CDs with it in the past.

I have the full Nero suite installed, and it is possible (but I don't think so) that it was installed sometime after the last time I used EAC. Nero will play the CDs without difficulty. Perhaps the Nero installation changed some default somewhere that EAC doesn't like?

How do I fix this?

tanstaafl.

Quite possibly the CD (or a previous one) had some Autorun virus on it to disable "copying". It may have installed itself permanently, or simply in RAM.

Use Linux for this this.. no such problems yet.

Cheers

Hi,

You have read the FAQ about using EAC right?

The FAQ has a configuration file example that works well, although I am not using Vista.

There is also a way to select the drive for the Audio source too. On the opening display, directly under the tool bar, there is a selection for the source drive. If you have more than one drive, it may have the wrong drive selected there. You will get that error message if the wrong drive is selected.

Ross

The only time I ever had this happen was when the CD had an autorun thing on it. For some reason, EAC's turn-off-autorun option didn't work. I ended up having to hold down shift while I inserted the CD. I don't know if that still works with Vista, but it's worth a shot.

Only one CD drive installed, and other programs (Windows Explorer, Nero, Windows Media Player, etc.) access it and play the tracks. No help in the EAC FAQ, either...

As a test, I used Windows Media Player to rip the tracks to MP3, and it did so with alacrity (much faster than EAC ever did) and a quick listen to the end result shows decent quality.

So far there appear to be just two operational discrepancies: (1) EAC apparently sees the drive but not the CD, and (2) if Windows autoplay option is set to "Take No Action", then Windows explorer gives an error message "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel" when I click on the H: drive.

What does it mean, "...Create an association in the Set Associations control panel?"

tanstaafl.

That is because Media Player, like iTunes, doesn't have robust error checking and recovery modes. Rip a handful of CDs with it and take a careful listen to them all and you'll find pops and cracks.

I'd recommend you give dBPowerAmp a try, I and many other long time EAC users have switched to it. It offers the following advantages over EAC:

- fully automates the multiple passes you need to make with EAC to ensure the best quality ripping
- fully automates AccurateRip, at the track level
- uses four different meta data services and attempts to pick the best from all for any given track
- gets good quality cover art for many albums
- automates track and album ReplayGain tagging
- can encode to as many different formats as you like in one go (I now rip to FLAC, high bitrate MP3 and low bitrate MP3 at the same time)
- makes better use of C2 error data (on some drives)
- much better UI (no more scanning through a text report to spot which tracks ripped accurately)

Not only does it do AccurateRip like EAC, it automates it all. Its normal mode of operation is to rip each track at maximum speed in burst mode. If the track matches the AccurateRip database then that is the track done (and therefore ripped at the same speed as Media Player). If the track isn't matched then it falls back to secure mode, for that one track.

You can do the same in EAC, but you have to rip in burst mode manually. Then look to see which tracks failed against AccurateRip and manually select those for a secure mode rip.

It isn't free like EAC, but I do believe it is better value. It has already saved me a lot of time.

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

The writeup (on their website) looks very impressive indeed.

My biggest reluctance to switch from EAC is because I have spent literally dozens of hours learning it and configuring it and making it do what I want. Nobody could claim that EAC's user interface is all that simple or intuitive!

Nonetheless, I have downloaded the trial dbpoweramp and if it works anything like as well as you (and their website) suggest, it will be my new ripper. As with EAC, I'll continue to use LAME as the encoder, and Nero has done well for me as far as burning the CDs, so I'll stay with that. Unless you can tell me of some obvious advantages to dbpoweramp's burner, that is...

I would still like to know, however, just what happened in my computer to suddenly make EAC stop working after all these months...

tanstaafl.

EDIT: Andy, you are my hero! I urge anybody who is still using EAC to take a look at the dbpoweramp suite. The user interface is far less intimidating, and nearly as powerful as EAC's. (I think EAC is a bit more versatile about setting up the tag information, but dbpoweramp's file-naming conventions are powerful enough that all I need to do is use MP3 Tag Studio to "Tag from Filename" and I'm done.) The speed was impressive, two and a half minutes to rip and encode (with LAME, VBR, ~170 KBPS) a 19 track, 73 minute CD, guaranteed (by Accurate Rip) error free and with the best file/tag info (compiled/compared from four different databases) I have ever had. The final track was ripping and simultaneously encoding at 48x listening speed.

Now, if only it weren't so expensive... I mean, twenty-four whole dollars to buy it ($36 if I get the top of the line with features I don't need like the CD burner, multiple batch processing, a bunch of codecs I don't use, etc.) but if I cut back to five meals per week for a while maybe I can afford it.

Thanks, Andy, for pointing this one out to me.

tanstaafl.

I did some google searching, I wonder if this could be the issue?

The $36 option also gives you:

"CD Ripper: Ultra Secure & C2 Pointers
CD Ripper: Profiles"

So I is worth the extra $12 even if you don't need the batch ripper and burner.

I'm puzzled as to why you need to use MP3 Tag Studio after ripping with dBPowerAmp, what is dBPowerAmp not doing to the tags that you need doing ?

Doug is real picky about his tags, and likes to change them slightly from what you and I might consider "standard". Especially for classical music.

I don't see how that matches with him saying he uses the "tags from filename" feature ?

The main reason I was asking is because dBPowerAmp has tag mapping functionality to allow you to tweak your tags to where you want them (to some extent) and I was wondering whether they would be any use to him.

The extra $12 also gives you multiple CPU encoding.

Or pay $0 and use a free LAME based encoder (I use grip, but apparently even better ones exist), with multi-CPU support, flexible file-naming, etc.

I'm just so old-fashioned in this regard, I suppose.

$0 doesn't get you a ripper with the ease of use and neatly integrated AccurateRip functionality that dBPowerAmp provides. Unfortunately I don't think there are any non-Windows* rippers that use the AccurateRip database, which is a shame because I don't think a decent ripper is complete nowadays without it.

Why would you want a ripper that you can never be sure that any rip could have a pop or a click lurking in it somewhere. With AccurateRip I don't have to worry about that.

I'm also fairly sure that there isn't a free ripper that takes results from four metadata services and combines them.

Sometimes the best software isn't free, thats just life.

* EAC and dBPowerAmp appear to be the only rippers using AccurateRip, though there is a Perl script floating about somewhere as well

Yeah, I figured someone would call me on that one. When I made that post, I had all of an hour's experience with the program, and had somehow missed the module that controlled the tag editing. It is every bit as powerful as EAC's, and a bit more intuitive in operation, but I'll still probably end up tweaking them a bit with MP3TS. Maybe not. I've ripped eight CDs, but haven't really gotten into the tagging part of the process yet.



Hmmm... the trial version I downloaded has those features... but I guess they go away after the 21 day trial period is over, don't they? So, yes, the hideously expensive $36 version is the better way to go.

This program rocks! It has completely solved several problems that I thought were caused by my computer, but were instead artifacts of EAC. If I had to guess, I would say that EAC is not totally happy with Vista. (For that matter, neither am I, but that's a rant for a different thread.)

tanstaafl.