CD-RW doesn't have ASPI drivers in Win XP
Back in 1999 a co-worker gave me this
nice program for ripping CD's to MP3. I like the program because it's so simple, it works very well with CDDB (I have used programs that do not), it's names my files the way I like (any way I want), and it will also create sub-folders for the Artist Name and Album Title (so I can organize them on my HD). And my favorite feature is that I can create these file with absolutely
zero ID Tag information. Some people like it, I don't. It's there if you want it, but I leave it out.
So what does this have to do with helping anyone solve thier ASPI problem? I'll get there, just not yet...
The software has three "CD-ROM access methods": ASPI, MSCDEX, and Analog. I have never used the MSCDEX. But on my previous desktop and my notebook I use the ASPI method. And it's been really nice, I can rip MP3s at speeds much faster than the actual audio time of the CD. But today when I installed the software on my new desktop (first machine I have run Win XP on), I notice that I could only select Analog as my source. And the worst part is that the encoding could only be done in real-time. So a 43 minute CD would take even longer than 43 minutes (because you have the real-time read time, then the normalization time (if selected), then the MP3 encoding time).
Some quick searches on google.com resulted that Win XP does not ship with ASPI drivers, and that you must update the drivers yourself. Some
page suggested to install
Goldenhawk's drivers, but they looked sketchy so I kept looking. Microsoft's support site
suggested downloading
Adaptec's ASPI driver, so I did. And after a reboot I could select the ASPI option in my MP3 encoder, but my actual CD-RW and DVD-ROM drive were not on the ASPI device list (only my virtual CD drives were on the list).
So I kept on searching, this time focusing a little on my actual hardware brand, Samsung. Unfortunately I didn't have much luck with their web site. They had no documents available on ASPI, and the latest CD-RW drivers they had for download was a really old looking application with the readme file dated 1997 or something really old, so I didn't bother with it. Then google led me to this
random page with a couple of notes on their experience with ASPI drivers, and it had a link to
Nero's wnaspi32.dll file, and said it has worked well with Win XP. So I downloaded it, and overwrote my existing file (the one I got from Adaptec), and rebooted. I loaded up my encoder and now can see both my physical drives, and can now rip audio CDs at 18x speeds.
So that was a very wordy description of my efforts, hope it helps someone.
To 'Tech Blog' or not to 'Tech Blog'
I recently found myself creating a new category in my Mozilla Bookmarks entitled "Tech Blogs". This was spawned after I found that several of the blogs I had bookmarked primarily or solely post only technology or programming related items.
I find these "Tech Blogs" (think I can stop quoting that term any time soon?) not only a good way to keep abreast of what's evolving in the tech world around me, but also a good resource for solutions to problems I have already run across, or will one day run into, and then I can think back and go "'so and so' talked about this... lemme search his site" (Note: It's already happened).
My Tech Blog list is still really small, but it will continue to grow in size until one day I will have to break it down into sub-categories. Here is the currently list:
Probably the best thing about the Tech Blog community is that they cross link to each other, maybe even at a higher percentage then normal blogs, so you can quickly find a huge amount of blogs dedicating to your particular Tech interests, like mine is mostly related to CFMX.
I think I have mostly stayed away from posting really technical related items, but I do often find myself overcoming problems that I know others are having (because I find similar problems in forums and on google.com). I am going to try and make a better effort of including this problems and hopefully solutions on this site as well. Hopefully google.com will index it and someone may find the answer they were looking for.
