I just purchased the new Dream Theater album, 6 Degrees Of Inner Turbulence, and had a wierd occurence when I tried to rip it to my hard drive. It would not rip the last song on each disk. Has anyone else has this problem? I know it happened another time with, coincidently, another Dream Theater album, Live: Scenes From New York. I use Media JukeBox with the LAME encoder and haven't had any troubles w/ other disks that I can recall...

Is it an "Enhanced" CD? Check the packaging, or look on the outer edge of the cd for a ring that stands out on the surface. If so, the ripper program you are using might not be seeing this, and it will cause problems at the end of the first track.

I'm not familiar with your specific program, but when I had this problem in Audio Catalyst long ago, I could right click on the track and manually set it's end point.

try posting to the media jukebox message board: like this one they have a pretty helpful community:

http://www.musicex.com/cgi-bin/interact/NeoBoard.pl?Action=ShowBoard&Board=inter

-ted

Yeah, if I insert the CD, some interface done by Elektra comes up (stupid Elektra!!). I read the MusicJukeBox BBS, and they said there was a problem with the last track on enhanced CD's. I guess I could use another program. Is AudioCatalyst the consensus ripper out there? Thanks, guys...

AudioCatalyst is out of date now. Most use audiograbber and/or exact audiocopy. Like someone else said, just move back the end point of the last track.

I've been using CDex and have had really good results (over EAC).. the best thing is, it's free, uses LAME (or whatever), and works nicely in the background.. The problem I had with EAC, was that the settings it had for an external LAME encoder were borked, so nothing ever got encoded..

My advice would be to rip the last track using an audio grabber, not digitally. Then give the CD back and get a full refund.
Phillips (the owners of the CD standard) refer to these things as "Silver disks with music on" and are legally considering the use of the "CD" logo to be an infringement by UMG etc for breaking music CDs.

I've been alternating between CDex and EAC. I had similar problems with EAC and Lame, but after I installed Lame 3.91 and played around with the options, it started working well. I think one rips digital audio about as well as the other, especially if your original cd is in good shape. However, CDex is crippled, in that you cannot add your own command line options. This is very important if you want to tweak your compression settings. For example, I use a modified "r3mix" set of options in Lame (see http://www.r3mix.net/):

--r3mix -V2 -b32 --lowpass 18.5

I'm pretty sure that using such command line options to tweak your encoding process is not possible in CDex, which limits your choices according to what it supports in its menu. It's not really important for the average user, but if you're concerned about controlling the quality of your collection, EAC is better.

This is not a copy protect scheme, it is the enhanced CD standard that causes no problems with programs aware of it. The ripper he is using dosen;t know how to deal with it, so the CD laser goes right onto the gap used to seperate the two and gets confused. As stated before, AudioGrabber will work fine to get that track, as will many other programs.

Enhanced CDs have been around longer then Napster and the RIAA getting upset about MP3s.

Yeah, AudioGrabber had problems before with extended mode or audio CDs with data tracks on them. I think it was a Underworld CD that I had problems with last time, but since AudioGrabber version 1.8x, I have not had any problems since. I really do recommend it for all of your ripping needs. As always, YMMV.

Cheers!
Dave

I have the same CD (DT rux!) and I had no trouble whatsoever ripping with Exact Audio Copy (once I exited the stupid Flash screen)

and they said there was a problem with the last track on enhanced CD's. I guess I could use another program.

If your program allows you to edit the start/end time-index points on a track before ripping, you do not need to use another program. Simply shorten the end time-index marker to the "real" end of the last track and rip away.

Usually, this time-index marker is edited by getting the "properties" of that track.

Just a note...I didn't have to do any fussing with anything to get EAC to rip it. I just opened EAC and it behaved as normal (with an extra data track at the end, which is just ignored).

I'm really digging this album, BTW.

I'm really digging this album, BTW.

Yes, definitely a great album. The Great Debate sounds eerily similar to 46 & 2 by TOOL.
BTW, I switched to AudioGrabber and upgraded my LAME encoder, and everything is good to go!