Exact Audio Copy

Blog

  • Nearly after every beta there was need for a bug fix, the program is now such complex that even thorough testing can’t find all problems. But now after all severe problems are known, I hurried to bring out 0.9 beta 2 to make the release as stable as the 0.9 beta 1 should have been. Anyway, I hope this will work for you!

  • Finally here is the 0.9 beta 1. I hope this version is quite stable, though it is only tested for some days, no major bugs seem to be left. The many minor bugs and additions will be done in the next versions…
    The following main changes are made from 0.9pb11 :

    • GUI restructured, added new buttons, changed button type to flat buttons. Artist and CD information is now directly accessible through the main window.
    • Profile usage is now easier and can be selected by a drop down box on the main window. For using your old profiles, copy them into the Profiles directory in EACs home.
    • Updated freedb usage to proto 5.
    • Configuration Wizard to setup basic drive, encoder and freedb configuration for beginner users.
    • Option setting for leaving out all advanced features, making it easier for beginners.
    • Secondary C2 extraction mode (may work better for some kind of erraneous CDs and for some but not every drive. Even if it may be misused for copy protected CDs, using this mode on protected CDs is only allowed when legal in your country). This mode is up to now very basic, and will be improved in upcoming versions.
    • Manual detection of TOC, usefull if a CD is defective and displays wrong track positions or data tracks instead of audio, EAC will try to detect the CD structure by analysis. For this, your drive must support Gap Detection mode B.
    • Uncompressed and compressed extraction is now divided, so compression options will missing “Internal WAV routines”.
    • More placeholders for external command line encoders in “User Defined Encoder” format, see FAQ for details.
    • Correction of MP+ decoding bug with command line decoder.
    • New Monkeys Audio (MAC) DLL support, you need at least DLL version 3.94.
    • Compression queue is saved to harddisk and continued on next EAC session.
    • Improving Pop Detection to 4 band analysis.
    • Some more smaller additions… ;))
    • Display of actual extraction position in real music time (for error checking)
    • Small corrections to ID3V2 routines, I hope they will still work 😉
    • Correction of support for some writers (no Philips/RAW MMC support though)
    • Many smaller additions and bug fixes

    Again I hope you will like this version!
    It is recommended to delete the registry enrty in HKEY_CURRENT_USER in order to prevent problems with previous versions.
    Work will continue, the next big step will be a localization version, which will help to translate all EAC texts into your own language. But please do not ask when it is ready, it will be finished, when it is finished! Thanks.

  • I just want to tell everybody that I have decided not to answer the registrations cards anymore (only those who contain extras 😉
    This is mainly because it takes too much of my time (which should better be spend in development) and I have lost tracking over the registrations in the last four weeks (because of a holiday and a water damage in my rooms). The registrations itself are fine, but I can’t decide anymore whether I already have answered or not. As I have collected registrations before I have answered them, the last eight weeks registrations will be without answer also.
    So from now on, please accept that I will not answer the registration cards anymore, sorry about this!

  • I will be on holiday from 12th September to 26th September, so please don’t send registrations nor emails to me during this time, as it would be much work to come up to them. I hope Ireland will be as nice as last time, now I will have a close look at Cork and Kerry :))
    I hope some persons in the mailing list will standing in for me and try to answer all questions that might occur there.

  • At the moment I build up a CD-ROM drive feature database for inclusion in EAC. For that purpose I need more submissions of features. So I ask everybody to please test and submit the drive features of EAC. “Detect Read Features”, “Examine C2 Feature” (if C2 was detected by the first test and using a scratchy CD) and “Offset Detection” (using as much CDs from the list). Please test all of your drives, even if you personally don’t use it for extraction, and also please try to detect offsets (which shouldn’t be important to most users, but I would like to have a complete database).
    Up to now I am in need of many more offset tests, the amount of feature tests are already ok. I would really appreciate your help, thanks!
    PS: If you disabled submission, it can be enabled again in EAC Options / Tools.

  • As the 0.9pb10 version of EAC caused again many new problems, mainly not detecting drives anymore, I released a new version quickly. I strongly recommend to download this version if you already use 0.9pb10.
    Of course I tested 0.9pb10 on my system but never encountered any problems. I use version 4.57 of ASPI, perhaps different versions make problems.
    Sorry about that…

  • I originally wanted to put out the next version as 0.9 beta, but now it only got to 0.9 prebeta 10. I force this release out as there were some major improvements and bugfixes that many users asked for day by day. It does not contain all features of 0.9 beta, but it is comes quite near, only some more additions to the wave editor are missing.
    The following main changes are made from 0.9pb9 :

    • Again many bug fixes (ID3V2 tag size for VBR header, Ricoh writing, compression in the background, etc.)
    • It is now possible to specify a different naming scheme for various artist CDs
    • The power down computer option can now be selected during extraction
    • Submission of drive features to a central database to share information with other users which don’t know the features of their drives or also to combine ones offset if several different results occured on detection.
    • ID3V2.3.0 tag support (previous version only wrote only ID3V2.4.0, which can’t be read correctly by a majority of tag/play utilities)
    • In order to access more devices on interfaces like USB, Firewire and of course IDE and SCSI drives, EAC is now able to use the ASAPI interface of VOB instead of ASPI or Native SCSI
    • If you own a multiprocessor system, you can start several encoding threads in the background to speed up compression
    • To use the newest Fraunhofer FastEnc MP3 encoder on-the-fly, EAC is now able to access the CoolEdit Pro MP3 PlugIn if copied to the EAC directory (fht.flt)
    • On external compression, the user defined encoder can use any file extension, Ogg Vorbis and RKAU are now supported as external command line encoders
    • Using Undo in processing waveform is now optional
    • EAC now uses FreeDB exclusively, to update your server list, use the “Get active FreeDB server list” function
    • Interpolation – Replace Frequency works fine now (I am quite satisfied with it now 🙂
    • EAC is able to use LAME.EXE (.MP3) and MPPDEC.EXE (.MP+ and .MPC) for decompression and for on-the-fly writing of CDs. Just copy the executables to the EAC directory. For MP3 decompression with LAME.EXE it is also necessary to either not having the MP3 Fraunhofer codec installed or to select the option in the compression options. Beware : You need the most actual versions of both programs as previous versions introduced errors in the decompression (sometimes even total trash). So decode a file once using EAC to make sure it is decoded correctly!
    • Some more smaller additions… ;))

    Hope you will like this version!
    I also tried to use the SHN Decoder shortn32.exe for on-the-fly decompression/writing in EAC, but the decompressor has some bugs making this impossible. It allows to write the decompressed output to the StdOut pipe, but it does not set the binary mode correctly. You could try it by yourself by decompressing using “shortn32 -x abc.shn – >abc.wav” , it will change endian and channels all over the file…

  • As the 0.9pb8 version of EAC caused many new problems, I decided to put out a new release in order to fix most of them. I strongly recommend to download this version if you already use 0.9pb8.
    Please note that this version store its options no longer in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key, but now use HKEY_CURRENT_USER. No options are transported to the new location, so if you want to use your old options set, save an option profile with your current version and import that into 0.9pb9.

  • This version is also a big bugfix release, but also incorporates many new features, I hope you will like it! I will really try to give out a new version more often from now on (I know, I promised so already earlier 😉
    The following main changes are made from 0.9pb7 :

    • Again many bug fixes (File naming, CD writer module, etc.)
    • Automatic creation of CUE sheets from WAV images
    • Splitting of WAV images according to their CUE sheets
    • Option not to open external commandline encoder window
    • ID3V2 tag support (before you start reporting that the tags are unreadable, please not that EAC support already ID3V2.4.0, but most other actual applications don’t)
    • MP+ command line encoder support
    • WAV editor could use RAM for temporary data
    • Finally, C2 support for the PlexWriter series (only the newer modells)
    • Many, many smaller additions and corrections…

    The next version will be probably 0.9beta. I hope you will like the new version, please be patient for the next one, I have only some spare time for EAC…

  • Some people reported problems with the LAME DLL. It works flawless for me, so those should try to redownload it. Albert Faber just released a bugfixed LAME DLL with his CDex 1.20, download it and try that DLL. If it does still not work, please contact me again.
    The problems on SCSI bus reset during writing are still unsolved, I just removed the SCSI1HLP.VXD from my windows/system/iosubsys directory, I hope this would help somehow.