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.