My system, custom built, has Sony DVD ROM DDU 1613 and Sony DVD RW DW-D26A drives. When ripping audio books like the Harry Potter series, with either WMP 11 or AudioGrabber, sometimes it nearly stalls doing the last few tracks. Sometimes I can do several cd’s with no problems then this starts again. Music cds don’t do this. Other programs that might be running at the same time are not affected. Is it possible it’s the drives or the IDE interface, some settings somewhere, or drivers? What can I do to fix this? Thanks.

I have a rule that when I'm working with optical drives, I don't have anything else running.

As far as your PC is concerned is doesn't differentiate "music" cds from "audio book" cds. The things that would be different would by the number and size of tracks and any DRM on the disc. I have ripped the last Harry Potter book CDs without problems. I would try checking the settings in your ripping software. Most decent rippers have various settings. I'd try slowing down the ripping process if possible. Michael J

Michael, I have ripped the first 6 of the 7 books. I realized a bit too late I didn’t need the high quality I had set for music so decided to rip again and reduce the size of the resulting mp3 files. What factors might affect the ripping process I am fighting with? I changed to voice quality at 64k. Do I want to rip to wav then to mp3 or rip directly to mp3? Using audiograbber. Thanks.

Sorry, can't help you with that program. I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) with the lame encoder. I believe my settings are to rip to wav and then to encode in mp3. Michael J