gnomebaker audio CD copy verrrrry slow

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 00:28 +0200, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> I just did that to my CD player and to my horror it said that DMA was
> NOT on ! Can't believe it, I never had to complain of anything with my
> drive. Now I am wondering, maybe I would be even happier if I could turn
> it on ?! :o)
> For example when I ripped all my CD's, I got about x4 speed, which was
> perfectly fine by me, but I read on this list that people find this slow
> and manage a lot more with DMA ?! That may also fix my problem with DVD,
> some times it's jerky, and I read here too, that it could be due to lack
> of DMA.
> 
> So I read "man hdparm", and then tried a "sudo hdparm -d /dev/hdc"
Almost perfect, but not quite!  The command is:
        sudo hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdc
You forgot the "1" which means "Turn this feature on".

"0" on the other hand, and as you might figure it out by now, means the
opposite: "Turn this feature off", just in case you want to know that.

> 
> But then when I check back, DMA is always off, it won't come one.
> 
> How is one supposed to proceed to enable DMA on a bloody CD drive ?
> 
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> Vince
>
>
And yes, ripping CD-ROM at 4x *IS* slow!  The normal speed would be
between 10x and 24x depending on the condition of the media, the quality
of your device, and the "paranoia" mode.  However, there's a bug in the
stuck Ubuntu kernel that cause this.  If you check "/var/log/system" or
run the command "dmesg | tail" just after starting ripping you'll see a
message that reads "dropping to sing DMA mode" which effectively means
(almost) turning DMA off.  I hope that Breezy (the soon to be released
Ubuntu version) fixes this.

You might want to turn the automatic mount feature in GNOME off just
before ripping and then re-enable it after done as some report a
significant speed boost when doing that.  Also, you might try using the
SCSI-IDE emulation layer (it's a bit hard) which *might* helps a lot (I,
personally, find this to fix the problem on my system).

As usual, I hope this clears things up.
Ziyad.