Author: Andre2

I am sorry that it took that long to finish the bug fix, but on the one hand I wanted to remove all that really bigger bugs and on the other hand I got the flu and couldn’t concentrate on anything week before last week… Now I am almost ok again 😉
So here is the (new) version that should fix most of the bugs of 0.8beta. 0.8 beta will be removed completly from the server, as the new one has nearly the same features…
The new version includes

• Fix of error detection and correction that does not worked correctly in 0.8beta! Further I replaced the guessing routines with the ones from 0.7beta, as many mailed me that the newer ones worked not as good as them. When I find out how to improve them, they will be back again, but for now the older guessing routines should work ok for most users.
• Fix of not finding matching read modes for some Philips and Toshiba drives. On these drives it is also necessary to select the option ‘Check for density parameters’. Further, some drives need to change wordnibbles to get correct results (otherwise only noise is extracted). For that a new option is included.
• The obsolete part that slowed down burst copy is now removed. Now it will copy on my Plex 14/32 with max 16.5X (accesses to harddisk too slow, because I only use a cheap Fast-SCSI card) and test tracks with something around 23.0X.
• Added ‘intelligent’ WAV file comparison. It will detect missing and extraneous bytes everywhere in the files and also gather other differences of both files. This feature could also be used in the WAV editor to easily select ranges of differences.
  Furthermore it could be used to determine the combined reader/writer offset.
• The WAV editor now has another filter, smoothing. This is helpful for many kinds of defects beside clicks and pops.

It seems that the IDE versions of the Yamaha CD-R(W) drives will cause many problems, mainly crashing EAC on startup. Therefore I added command line options for these drives for the moment. I will soon debug this on such a drive. No other drives seem to cause such problems…

I have to say that the official release has still too many bugs. Thats why I plan to release a “0.81” beta somewhen this week or next week.
The main bugs that should be removed then are these :

• Error check works not correctly in 0.8beta! It will often not find errors even if there are some! Should already be removed by now. This bug occured after I rewrote many parts of the extraction methods and of the guessing routines. I just forgot to mark some kind of bad blocks as bad… 🙁 The new extraction methods should nevertheless work with the same speed as before on good CDs.
• Could not find matching read modes for some Philips and Toshiba drives.
• Already removed the obsolete part that slowed down burst copy. Now it will copy on my Plex 14/32 with max 16.5X (accesses to harddisk too slow) and test tracks with something around 23.0X.
• Some other smaller bugs, that will be removed as far as I now them…

Please note that the feature detection test is purely heuristical and does not always give back the correct results! So don’t trust them, if you know that your drive has other features!

Now here it is, the new official 0.8beta. 😉
It was really a long time without any updates, but I think it was worth the time. Even if it has no really big new features, but many improvements and bugfixes on nearly all functions.
The new version includes

• New fast secure read modes for accurate readers and also for drives that caches
• Complete improvement of read modes and Test read function, allowing to calculate CRC checksums without using disk space
• BladeEnc DLL support
• Remove leading and trailing silence
• Fill missing offset samples with silence
• Automatic detection of drive features
• Selection of extensions for headerless WAV files
• Test detected gaps on silence
• Save extraction log
• Selection of error recovery quality for faster extraction on bad CDs
• WAV editor with already some functions for editing, more to come…
• Many bugfixes, too many to mention

There are still many bugs, but I hope to remove them sooner or later. If EAC makes problems on your computer, please read the What’s New page.
I will do nothing on EAC the next week, but then work for 0.9beta will begin. Many people told me a lot of ideas of improvement. Because there were too much mail the last month, I would ask to tell me the not yet implemented ideas again, if not stated in the ‘Planned for next release’. But also experiences are appreciated!

I am sorry to say that the release date will be some days later. New expected release date will be the 22.1.98. The last weeks I had lot of work at the university and EAC also took much work to finish all features I planned for 0.8 beta. You will surely be surprised which features are now really in it… 🙂
I have to say the 0.8 beta will not have these announced features: Submission of CDDB entries, Support of other local CDDB databases and Proxy authentification. But I will try to include it in version 0.9 beta then.

I did not had as much time as I wanted the last two weeks. So I didn’t work on EAC very much. But now, I have christmas holidays and work will go on a little bit faster again.
From now on, I will not only send notifications on new versions to the people in my mailing list, but also everytime a news entry is added to the What’s New page. The mail will contain the newsentry… If you don’t want to be in the mailing list anymore, just send me a mail. Thanks.
Expected release date of EAC 0.8 beta will be 18.1.99, but I have to wait if there are still bigger problems with it, this release date could change.
By the way, today I visited the ‘Star Trek World Tour’, but was not as big as I thought… The ratio of fun/money could be much better, but Star Trek fans will nevertheless have a look at it 😉

So, I wish everybody merry christmas and a happy new year!

Work is going on pretty well, but I have to say that it is most probably, that CDDB submission will not be in 0.8beta.
I am sorry for that, but if I would implement it right now, the release date will move at least a month… So I decided to put it back until 0.9beta.
All other features are implemented in time, at least I hope so. There will be plenty of new features in version 0.8beta, also some that are not named in the list above 🙂
But furthermore there will be some annoying bugs removed, at first the bug, that the last sector of a CD is not read in any case. So the last track will be one sector too short always. This was a really silly bug and I am sorry for that. Moreover there are error poping up like Assign Range at Utils.2593 and that the system slows down totally when starting EAC. So please do not mail me if you encounter any of these bugs, I know them already and I work on their removal. I don’t know if I am able to remove them all completly, but I will try so.
I have to say, that NOBODY mailed me regarding my last news entry (a few lines down) from the 5-November. 🙁 If you are not getting pops, you probably made a CDDB database by yourself…
There is one more favour, I would like to ask. If you encounter any new link of a really big shareware site to my page, please tell me. And moreover if you find any review of EAC (or something similar) in a computer magazin, I really would like to have a copy of it (or at least the according pages, or if postage is too expansive, also a scan of that page would be sufficient)… Thanks in forward!

I am already working on the next version, and for that I want to ask everybody who often got pops on extraction to send these to me to test my routines… I am in need of some real pops! 😉
Furthermore I will start a EAC database project now. If you have build up your own database (perhaps also some with lyrics), please send it to me. I will build one huge database of all your CDs and put it somewhere in the web. This will help those, who don’t have internet access (or not always).
Please send me a short mail if you want to send me WAV files or databases that are over 10 kb in size… Thanks in forward!
Don’t expect any program updates until christmas, only if big bugs have to be removed 🙂

Release Date of version 0.7beta
This version mainly bugfixes many small and some bigger problems, also the hanging on some systems and some CDDB problems…
The new version includes

• CRC checksum calculation for tracks
• Test read function, allowing to calculate CRC checksums without using disk space
• Disabling CD Autostart feature for runtime of EAC
• Lyrics support (first try 😉
• External MP3 compression support (including long filenames and ID3 tagging)
• Automatic CUE Sheet creation of CD’s (including all track indices!)
• Time format could be changed from hundredth seconds to frames
• Leaving out WAV header (optional) for true MP3 files or raw audio data
• Batch CDDB queries
• Lots of bug fixes, and as always some new bugs
  (drive reset, speed selection and CDDB bugs should be fixed now)

One of the main bugs still in EAC reported by my beta testers is that after extraction the system is not really stable anymore at least on some systems. I don’t know why yet, because on my system everything seems to be ok. But to be on the safe side you should reboot if you need a real stable system. Sorry!
By the way, my Plextor came back like new after a week of repair… But I decided to sell that one and bought a new Plextor 32TSI already. Furthermore today I bought a Soundblaster Live! 🙂

I already removed many bugs of version 0.6beta, but there is still the main bug in it… On some systems (until now only SCSI systems are affected) the system hangs after starting extraction. The drive LEDs are flashing like the drives doing a reset. The flashing LEDs bug is already removed, but on these systems there is another bug on it (perhaps very similar to that other bug), that will read now the first part of the track only zero samples and the rest correctly. I will go debugging it on a friends computer next week.
Because of that many bugs, I decided to bring out a new version earlier than planned. If everything works fine and I will find that bug, version 0.7beta is planned to come out end of next week. It will not have all features described above, to be honest the main features (Submission, Pop Removal and Secure Mode for Caching Drives) will miss. But I think bug fixing should be done first.

There seems some problems with EAC v0.6beta on some systems. There was one report of extracting too slow (possibly only Plextor 32TSI) and one report of not ripping of second or third drives. Only the first drive was used for extraction even if another one was selected…
If you also think you have found a bug, please test it also with older versions (like 0.5beta and 0.4beta). If both are not working, it is an old bug not found yet, otherwise it is one that is new in 0.6beta (What is interesting for me to know…)