Cannot extract/play digital audio with DMA enabled on cdrom drives

Are you burning at the same time as ripping?

You're likely to overwhelm your I/O subsystem when DMA is on, since it increases the bandwidth the CD player is taking on the IDE bus.

Generally it is best to rip to hard drive and then burn from there.

There should not be a problem if you're trying to do a drive-drive copy of an audio CD...what models are your CD-RW and CD-ROM drives? What speed are you recording at? Are the drives SCSI or IDE?  What speed CPU, how much RAM, etc do you have?  All IDE/SCSI drivers up to date?

-dogztar

"There should not be a problem if you're trying to do a drive-drive copy of an audio CD...what models"

My sentiments exactly, because this used to work just fine, now it doesn't.

"what models are your CD-RW and CD-ROM drives?"

I have and ACER56X Max CDROM drive, and a Plextor 12/10/32A CDRW, both aree IDE. CDROM is secondary master, CDRW is secondary slave, this used to work fine, with either as master to the other.

"What speed are you recording at?"

Used to be able to record at 12x from CDROM to CDRW without the buffer ever going below 97%, did not need BURN Proof at all!

"What speed CPU, how much RAM, etc do you have?"

AMD K62 400 MHz, 512MB of pc133 Ram.

"All IDE/SCSI drivers up to date?"

Yes, I have tried every available driver I could find, this used to work with WIN '98 default IDE drivers set in DMA mode, or with VIA 4in1 IDE drivers, (many different versions worked)!

I have all the latest drivers for every piece of hardware in my system, so I think that there is some driver/registry corruption causing this issue. I'm afraid that I may have to format and reinstall windows. I guess that having this damned system working good for almost 2.5 years without a reinstall is the best I'll ever be able to do. I was trying for a longer record than that, lousy M$!!!

On thing I have noticed is that the VIA IDE drivers will not set any of my drives to UDMA33 Mode 2 anymore, only mode 1. I used to be able to set all my drives (minus the CDRW, which can only handle DMA mode 2) to UDMA33 mode 2, now I am limited. I'm not sure what the glitch is here.

One more thing, I am trying to use Easy Cd Creator 5.2 Plat...

Ahhh...I think that the EZCD creator is the problem...I have had tons of problems trying to do CD copies with EZCD Creator v5.x.  It just doesn't work correctly for some reason.  Try Nero (www.nero.com) or remove EZCD 5 and install an older version (if you have one by chance).

EZCD 5 tries to use the digital extraction, which is a change from the previous versions I believe.

Another solution is to rip the CD to WAV files then burn them from the harddrive.  This way takes longer, but it may save you some headaches.  Use EAC to rip the tracks (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/).

-dogztar

What the real problem here is, is that I can't extract/rip DIGITAL AUDIO IN DMA/UDMA MODE!!! I used to be able to with EZCD5, Blindread/write, audiograbber, et al... I am starting to think there are ASPI issues, or Windows Media Player 7.1 issues. I know EZCD5 isn't supposed to use ASPI drivers for ATAPI IDE devices (at least from what I've seen it doesn't), unless you are using Take Two (a bundled backup app). Blindread/write uses ASPI drivers in compatability mode, but in normal mode it uses the Patin Couffin hw access mode, which also seemed to work fine in DMA mode previously. Even if I try to rip the audio as wav files, I cannot extract the tracks as digital audio unless I am NOT using DMA/UDMA, which sucks supremely... I have also tried EAC with the same results. Thanks for your input, but I am still waiting for the silver bullet here.

There are updated ASPI drivers available from Adaptec which may help:
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/support/driverdetail.html?cat=/Product/ASPI-4.70&filekey=aspi_v470.exe

So you're saying that you've got an install of Win98 that's still mostly working after 2.5 years?!?!  You better call Microsoft and tell them, that's one for the record books! Heh heh...I've never had Win98 last for more than a year and a half at most without needing to be reinstalled.  Granted, there should be a way to fix this without doing that, but it may be more trouble than its worth.  Any other changes made to the system between the time you installed the new CDRW and had it working and when the problems started?  You mentioned Media Player 7.1...try uninstalling it, its a pain in the arse anyway.

-dogztar

Yeah, I was thinking of trying your recommendations (updating ASPI again), and removing media player 7.1. I've heard of alot of problems with it...

I'm off to try your suggestions, and will re-post when I find out if it helped.

Ok, here's what I did:

I uninstalled Windows Media Player 7.1 fully, including the EZCD integration. I rebooted, then installed the APSI 4.70 update.

At this point EZCD wouldn't load properly. I had to uninstall and reinstall EZCD 5 platinum. No problem there...

Then, I tried to enable DMA on both devices (the CDRW and CDROM). From here on out I will refer to the CD devices by their drive spec. CDROM is F: and CDRW is G:

After setting DMA and rebooting for the change to take effect, I loaded EZCD5 and tried the audio extraction tests on drive F: I was not suprised to see that the audio read timed out as it always had. This is one of many methods which I used to "test" for proper digital audio extraction. After this failed, I figured I'd try the test on G: no suprise here either, this test passed.

this got me to thinking...
In the BIOS the CDRW is set to PIO mode 4 because the drive does not support UDMA mode at all, however the CDROM is set to auto PIO and Auto DMA mode. In this configuration the CDROM would always come up in UDMA33 mode and was supposedly working in that mode without a problem, or so I thought. I decided to try setting the CDROM to PIO mode 4 only and let windows manage the DMA transfers by itself without the bios having any control over this. Viola, it works now, better than it ever did!

Here's the results of the tests I ran after the change in BIOS settings:
F:
Data Transfer Rate Test
Small files: 4x 743KB/Sec.
Large Files: 29x 4352KB/Sec.
Average: 18x
audio extraction speed: 19x 3300KB/Sec.

G:
Data Transfer Rate Test
Small files: 2x 442KB/Sec.
Large Files: 22x 3346KB/Sec.
Average: 14x
audio extraction speed: 15x 2636KB/Sec.

WOW, 19x, this is a few thousand KB/Sec. faster than it ever was! All I could ever get the drive to do before (when DMA mode was working), is 15x audio extraction.

all I can figure is that the flash BIOS upgrade I performed cuased some timing issues with the OS that weren't seen before the update. I could not "downgrade" the BIOS, because I needed the large IDE device support it provided for the 120G WD 7200 RPM drive I just installed.

Unfortunately I could not fix the issue with anyone's suggestions, but I will think about this and decide what to do with the points I have sitting out there. I'm a pretty good propeller-head, so maybe I'll feel generous and give both who provided input 50 points just for doing so... Give me a day to think it over, I have alot of other stuff to deal with right now.

Thanks for the input, both of you :)

dogztar,

I'm gonna give you both 50 points for trying to help. I have plenty of points and usually don't need too many. Again, thanks for all the suggestions both of you made.