Strange! I never encountered that problem except on some protected CD's, but SS will abort the ripping with reason. I believe your problem is in ripping stage, not in conversion (encoding) stage because there are lots settings can duplicate your problem, say incorrect read sectors that greater than the CD ROM capability, incorrect offset settings, jitters, C2 - h/w error recovery capability, misleading TOC of CD - extra CD or protected CD. Unfortunately, SS came without these settings except the Smooth Reading option - it works on scratch CD's. I suggest you re-do a test on CD drive with a good audio CD again. I noticed that you do conversion with file, if encoded from Helix mp3 encoder with VBR options enabled, please get the latest one v5.1 to do ripping again.