WL12 audio CD import in Ultra-safe mode reads disc repeatedly forever

WaveLab
1

If I import an audio CD with the “Ultra-Safe Mode” option, set at default (2), it repeats reading the CD until cancelled.
I stopped at “prolog #33” …

WL 12.0.51 (build 15) on Windows 11 25H2.

2

This means that every time WaveLab tries to read, the result differs from the previous one. This means the CD is in poor condition, or it is the CD drive itself.

1 Like
3

Ah … OK.

With a known good commercial CD, to my horror I realised that my last remaining SATA Plextor is giving errors. I tried a spare USB-attached Samsung drive and it worked fine. What I noticed is that the Samsung drive settled on a speed of 8x – which was fine – and succeeded first time, however there is no way to influence the speed at which a drive reads a CD.

As a test, I used FMJSoft’s ACDR on the Plextor, which also resulted in audible glitches, but that has two other modes, “jitter” and “scratch”, and the latter worked fine. N.B. The CD itself is known good. I don’t know what these modes do in that specific application, but it did prove that the SATA Plextor is still capable of reading accurately – just not at 40x speed, which is the only option in WaveLab now.

Is there any way that WaveLab can be made to reduce the speed at which a CD is read?

4

Another possibility is simply that the CD is using some kind of protection. I don’t know about recent CDs, but it was common a few years ago for certain labels.

5

A much better option IMHO is this program. https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

6

I’m happy to use external applications as CD-ripping is something I very rarely need to do any more, but perhaps a note could be added to the documentation to explain that a faulty read can result in endless attempts (or perhaps add a “max” # reads parameter).

Thanks!

1 Like
7

This should be it. I must say I didn’t test that for ages.

image
image552×632 21.6 KB

8

Yes, that’s the option, but the “2” there seems to mean the number of consecutive identical reads that must be gotten in order to call it “Ultra-Safe”, not the maximum number of attempts. In my case, running the SATA Plextor at 40x speed resulted in different errors each time, therefore the process never terminated.

Now that I know this, I won’t kick it off and then go to lunch :slight_smile: