? Strange Jason Mraz (Elektra) CD Behavior

Hi,

I tried to rip two Jason Mraz CDs recently (Waiting For My Rocket to Come and Mr. A-Z) with EAC but had a lot of trouble.

The first thing I noticed was that when I clicked EAC to begin the rip, the CD spun up and made the most horrendous noise (like a lawnmower), like it was spinning 100x faster than it should, and/or it was wobbling/vibrating. I left it to finish and found that only the first track was reported as correct by AccurateRip, while the rest were not. I tried a different, random CD and it displayed none of this behavior. I then repeated with the other Mraz CD and it did the same thing as the first. I then tried again with another random CD and again it worked fine.

Naturally, I was freaked out and confused. I examine the discs to see if maybe they have some sort of imbalance that is causing them to wobble, but there is nothing visible. There are also no significant scratches or anything.

I tried ripping at a slower speed, but it still does the same thing. I got the same results in both my CD and DVD writers.

Thinking that maybe something happened to my discs (perhaps they were damaged somehow—they were both next to each other after all), the next step I took was to get a copy of the CDs from the local library. They had a couple of copies of each CD, so with a little patience I managed to test each of their copies of the discs and got the same results (all the while testing a random one of my CDs between and always getting proper results).


(What I will try right after I finish typing this is to rip the disc as an image rather than tracks and see if that works, then perhaps mount the image and see if ripping the tracks from that works.) (*UPDATE*: No, it still did the same thing. CloneCD reported it as reading at ~20-25x. It “shifted gears” a few times near the end, then finished. Also, I cannot seem to get EAC to even see virtual drives. )

So, what the heck is going on? Does Elekctra have some sort of bizarre copy protection? Can anyone who has either of these discs check to see if theirs displays the same behavior? (Oh, it plays fine in my discman.)


Thanks.