Cd Ripping - is it better to use inbuilt CD drive of laptop or use an external Cd drive

Another vote for DB poweramp. I tried EAC...horribly complex & on optimal audiophile settings, I found it ludicrously slow (and I have a reasonably fast pc). I only burned one cd...then deleted EAC.

melb I did pretty much the same but in all fairness DB Poweramp also slows down considerably when accurate rip is on and CD is not good quality. You have to decide whether its worth it to wait or not. In most cases I find it is not and I have yet to obtain an audibly poor quality rip having ripped several thousand CDs to-date. If CD is in good conditon accurate rip happens as fast as otherwise. Its only when portions of CD have to be re-read many times in an effort to get a good read that slowness occurs. You have to have a really beat up or defective CD in general for bad reads to occur with any more than a minute % of the data overall. If this is clearly audible I have yet to hear it. DBPoweramp seems to do a good job with the rip no matter what. It is very well done overall including ease of use and flexibility in trading off rip time versus end quality.

@mapman and @melbguy1 not that we need/want to belabor the point of "slowness", but in the case of EAC (and likely the case with db Poweramp although I have no experience with it), the software can easily be configured to ignore/bypass "un-correctable" read errors. In so doing, the overall rip process is not stymied by the few bad sectors on the disk. Granted, those un-correctable tracks would have been bypassed in the rip, however, one can then re-rip those failed tracks in "burst" mode which will be very fast (because there is no attempt to correct anything). Further, the user now knows where the error/failure occurred.

@mapman, thanks for your feedback on the general use of DB Poweramp Poweramp. Atleast if it is more user friendly I can live with slow ripping speed using the Accurate rip option on lesser quality cds. But it’s good to get your 1st hand f’back on ripping with/without that feature.
@gdhal, thanks for the tip to bypass un-correctable read errors. Though fyi bad read errors can be reduced by using Ultra Bit Platinum-Plus cd treatment. I also found that product works well with dvd’s.

With error correction in ripping software, IMO quality of CD drive is not very important.   The software will read as many times as needed to get all the data, batch process.

But in real time, such as CD player, where data is read only once, quality of CD drive is very important.    Some companies such as MSB, use error correction buffers a whole track in memory before play.  

IMO CD treatment might help with real time but not batch processing.