Topic: EAC Read and Sync Errors

[jamroom]

Can anyone explain why read and sync errors occur?

I use EAC to rip live audio recordings that are sent to me on cd. Up until recently, I probably found errors on only one disc, out of many ripped over the last couple of years. However, over the last couple of weeks, I have found read and sync errors on cds from three different sources. Though I could successfully rip some cds from the batches sent to me, some had a number of errors, listed as "suspicious positions". As many of you will know, some of these discs take a looooong time to rip. FWIW, I always clean the discs, when necessary.

I started to suspect my pc dvd-rw, but after loading EAC and setting the offset correction on my laptop, I am having the same problems with the same discs. I loaded one of the ripped discs into Audition, but could not detect any audible (or visible) errors at the "suspicious positions".

Given that many traders are concerned with "less than perfect" lineage, including rip errors, I was wondering what you think about this matter.

[boojum]

There is an excellent EAC support group on Yahoo which would be the best source of help on this.  It is active and knowledgeable.  That you have had the same problem on different drives eliminates that it is a drive problem, I would think.  Are they from the same source/burner, these faulty CD's?

[jamroom]

Thanks for the advice.

No, the discs come from three different guys in different parts of the world. I'm just lucky, I guess...

[H₂O]

Read and Sync errors just mean that the calc'd CRC doesn't match what is written to the CD.  This can be caused by many things and can end up with inaudible issues or audible issues.    Some causes I have seen - scratches, bad burner, bad reader, bad batch of discs, burning discs too fast, etc

It means that you can't trust the copy you have is a bit-for-bit accurate copy of the original CD.

I wouldn't worry about it if it's for personal use or there is a well documented circulating source -> I just wouldn't trade it, but IMO you shouldn't be trading CD Rips anyways.

[jamroom]

but IMO you shouldn't be trading CD Rips anyways.

Eh? I think you misread my first post. These are audience recordings sent to me on cd. I need EAC to rip them in order to flac them for uploading.


Back to the errors. It just seems to be quite a coincidence that three different traders could have problems with their discs, given that not all cds from source had errors. Thanks for the info.

[dgale]

I used to find that certain drives would give me this problem with discs and once I tried a new drive, the discs that previously had errors extracted fine.  THe old drive otherwise seemed to work fine but I'd put a lot of miles on it and I just figured I wore it out one way or another to the point it was not reliably reading the data off the disc.  If I remember correctly how EAC works, it reads each section of data a couple times and if they compare exactly the same then it moves on, but if they don't perfectly compare then it keeps reading and comparing the section until it either gets agreement and moves on, or if it can't ever get consistency, it give you an error message, flags that location, and moves on. 

[jamroom]

^^^ yeah, that's what I thought until I tried the drive of my nearly new laptop and got the same results.

As an update. One of the discs was re-burned at a slower burning speed and now rips properly. I also have an alternate source for one of the other shows, so hopefully it will not have the errors.

FYI, one of the discs took around 10 hours to extract, with the EAC log recording the errors as "suspicious positions" and giving the time where it was on the rip. As mentioned, I checked the wavs in Audition, but could find no visual, or audible, faults whatsoever, at any of the position errors...

Despite boojum's helpful post, the EAC yahoo group would appear to be the exact opposite of active now. I never received any kind of answer from there, though H2O's post above probably covered it.

Thanks to all who posted. I do realise how difficult it is to get an answer on some of the more difficult questions, so appreciate the time people take to try and help out.