What the hell is ASPI? ASPI is just a way for your CD-ROM to talk to your Operating System. It's just a set of files. Windows95/98/ME comes with ASPI already installed, which is why users of these operating systems can skip this step. It's the Win2k/XP users who sometimes have trouble, because those operating systems don't come with ASPI layers installed by default. EAC requires the ASPI layer to run properly. So what do I do if I'm using Win2k/XP? Try using this simple method first. Click on this Nero ASPI Layer DLL link. Windows will ask if you want to save or open this DLL file. Select Save. Change to the directory you installed EAC in, which is usually C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy. Click Save. Now continue on with the rest of the Steps. If you have trouble getting EAC to recognize an audio CD in your drive later on, or EAC won't start because of an ASPI error, come back to this detailed help section, there may be one more thing you have to do. Alright, I'm back, EAC won't recognize the audio CD (or shows an ASPI related error). Now what? First make sure you actually have an audio CD in your cd-rom drive. (You'd be surprised). Next, make sure you have the correct drive selected in EAC. (Again, you'd be surprised). Now, if you're sure that EAC isn't recognizing audio CDs, we may need to install the ForceASPI layer, which requires a reboot. Click on the ForceASPI 1.7 link.. Save this .zip file to your hard drive in a directory. In Windows explorer, right click on the frcaspi17.zip file and choose extract to folder (Note: if you can't unzip a .zip file, you will need to download and install WinZip from www.WinZip.com Change to the folder that you unzipped all the files to. You will see a file called INSTASPI, double click on it. You will now need to reboot. Once you've rebooted, restart EAC (assuming you've already finished the rest of the steps) Hopefully now EAC will be working for you.