Blog

Sorry to say that I had to add some ad banners to these pages. This become necessary as until now I paid all webspace and internet costs by myself the last 2 years (which are per month $10 for the webspace and around $10-$20 for internet usage). Not only that I haven’t earned anything by EAC, even more I put actually money into it. And I will soon get DSL, so costs will increase even more. I thought about how to get some income for all expenses, and making EAC shareware or something like that isn’t favored by me (and probably also not by you 😉 So it seemed the best way adding some banners to my site, sorry for any inconvenience!

As the last version still contained many new bugs, I release a new prebeta version with most of these bugs fixed. Additionally I already implemented some smaller new features. Hope this will work better…
The following changes are made from 0.9pb6 :

• Again many bug fixes (LAME DLL fixes, Compression crash, ID3V1.1 Tag corrections, etc.)
• Visiual CUE sheet editor in the wave editor
• On the fly burning of Monkeys Audio sound files
• Queuing of compression tasks in the background on extraction (as option, need probably some tests)

Next updates will still take some more time, I am pretty busy at the moment.

Sorry that I didn’t released a new version so far, but I had plenty of work at the university and in my job. But now 0.9pb6 is finally finished. I removed many bugs lately, but of course there will be still plenty of them…
I decided that this release and all future prebeta releases will be available again to all users, it should be stable enough to not having piles of bug reports. Further this version has ToolTips for most option dialogs that should help beginner users. From now on there will be more frequent, but smaller updates as mainly audio editor features will be improved for the next version. It is possible that the one or other feature is not perfect yet, so please report any bugs to the mailing list.
The following changes are made from 0.9pb5 :

• Many bug fixes (Plextor 40x Multisession (I hope it is gone), etc.)
• Support for Sony (HP) writers
• ToolTips help for most option dialogs
• Additional options for LAME and Gogo DLL encoder
• Creation of offset CDs for determing the combined read/write offset or the absolute read offset (if you know the write offset of your drive)
• More improvements to the write layout editor
• BurnProof support for Plextor 1210
• Correct offset correction for MP3 compression and decompression
• Drag and drop from the explorer to EAC (Main window will compress (WAV) or call the write module (CUE), the write window will add files as index 1 (WAV) or load a cue sheet (CUE))
• ID3 V1.1 support
• Direct (without previous decompression) MP3 and compressed WAV write support
• Support for writing under Win2000 for IDE drives (that work under Win98)
• More new features, too many to mention…

I am sure you will enjoy it! 😉

I just uploaded a bugfixed 0.9pb4 version, mainly the native SCSI functions did not work that well. I hope to have fixed it now, please tell me about your experiences. This version will in every case switch the interface to ASPI (if installed), so if you want to test the native interface you have to explicit select it. I named this version to 0.9pb5 as otherwise there would be again version naming conflicts when exchanging informations.
I also quickly added some more compression features, like Gogo DLL on-the-fly compression, Shorten and Monkey’s Audio external commandline compressors.

Today I release the 0.9pb4 to the public, but this was the last prebeta version I released to the public, the next ones will be non-public again. It was really a mistake to let anybody download 0.9pb3 without most people knowing what “prebeta” really means… Many think it is a full working version, but it wasn’t and also this one will contain many bugs, that’s why it is called prebeta. I just put up this version to remove most bugs of the last version.
The following changes are made from 0.9pb3 :

• Many bug fixes (sound output, CDDB, LAME, cd write, MMC C2, etc.)
• Support for some more writers
• CD-Text write support
• FAAC (both versions) support
• Native SCSI support for WinNT/2000
• Many improvements to the CD write layout editor
• Some more new features…

Hope you enjoy it!
The SCSI native interface could be still buggy, on my computer sometimes the data was not transferred correctly. This is visible e.g. in displaying only one track (track number 00!) with other wrong informations. This could happen after working minutes or hours without any problem. I don’t know why this happens, if anybody can recreate a situation where this always occurs, please tell me…
Everything else should be quite clear, if there are questions please use the forum or the mailing list.
I am on holiday from 26.3. to 16.4 visiting USA for a car trip around Texas, Colorado, Nevada, California… So please do not send any registration cards nor emails (whatever kind), as my mailboxes would explode otherwise during these three weeks… 😉 Thanks!

Here comes a official released 0.9pb3. This is because many users complaint about the information(!) dialog. I just don’t want to read these mails anymore… I don’t think that that warning message was so important, if I had knew what troubles it would cause, I probably never implemented it, making lots of users work with older versions.
Enough for that, this version should remove many problems with older EAC versions like the Win2000 file dialog box bug. Please remark that this is only a prerelease without any documentation and no support. Everybody who tested 0.9pb1 and pb2 should test this version on new/old bugs and report me about it. I hope everything will work, as I implemented many features “last-minute”. Don’t ask me about features that don’t work, as not everything is implemented yet. There are many additions like LAME support (EXE and DLL), index based extraction, cool down feature, etc.
The next prebeta version will be unofficial again, the 0.9b final is planned for march 2000.
If you have a question, please use either my mailing list or my forum, but do not bother me directly. If there you found a real(!) bug, then please contact me.
Now I wish all of you merry chrismas and a happy new year! Peace to the world!

I’m sorry that again a time-out message pop up so early… I hope there are no severe problems, as EAC crashes Windows on some systems when displaying this message. If there are such problems, contact me…
I finished the second prebeta version of EAC 0.9, now more CD writer should work. It will now be tested by my beta testers. There was a severe bug in ALL secure extraction routines, I found it because it was occuring more often in the new C2 extraction mode… Further there are many bugfixes and some additions, hope you will like them.
I already announced a utility to gather CD informations for EAC offset detection routines. If you own a Plextor PX32 then please help me and send me as many cd infos from common(!), well-known CDs using this program. It will create a file in the current directory for every CD catalogized. Please send me as many CD infos as possible (you should compress them with WinZIP into an archive before sending it), and please fill all information fields you will be asked by the program!
There will be most probably a third prebeta version before the release of the official 0.9 beta, so I don’t expect that version before the new year!
I will soon get the opportunity to test EAC on Win 2000 RC2, to find that annoying file dialog bug… Further my Forum pages are down, I already mailed my provider, but didn’t received a response so far.
There is now an offical EAC banner, have a look on my links page.

I will be on holiday from 14.11 up to 21.11, so I won’t respond to any mails. If you have a question, please subscribe to my mailing list and ask your question there…

In tradition of the Hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkiens “Lord Of The Rings”, today I will give you my birthday present 🙂
I compiled 0.9 prebeta 1 and made it available to prebeta testers. The suprise in this version I announced are two new features :

• C1/C2 Error Correction Secure Read Modes for Plextor CD-ROM drives and MMC-complient drives that support this feature. Using this mode, the drives will use nearly burst speed for secure extraction. The Plextor CD-ROM drives 8x up to 40x , some MMC-complient drives like Teac 56S/58S and some other drives support this feature. In this mode, my Plextor PX32 extracts up to 16.7 X in test mode…
• CD Writing Routines for writing audio tracks. This will work at the moment only for MMC compliant writers. The burn stream could also be offset corrected, so that having an absolute CD-ROM drive offset and an absolute CD-R write offset. The write offset is easily calculated by this formula : Absolute Reader Offset + Absolute Writer Offset = Combined Reader Writer Offset

There is a bug in EAC causing the crash of Win 2000 RC2 when pressing OK or CANCEL in every file dialog box. I already try to fix it, but didn’t found the bug yet.
In the next official release or perhaps already in 0.9 prebeta 2 will most probably again CDDB proxy support included, but CDDB access will be then HTTP only…
Don’t expect the official 0.9 beta before mid of december, there is still many work to do until then. Over my birthday I will be at home, so I will read you again sunday…
By the way, my pages now also features a Forum…

So, here comes EAC 0.85 beta 4. I added the beta version number in order to prevent disinformations in the mailing list, to identify the version correctly. All main remaining bugs from beta 3 should be removed now and I will start work on version 0.9 beta.
Mainly the bugs with NT are removed now, further the wrong ending times of some CDs on some drives should now be corrected, although it is still possible that very few CDs will still not work (mainly CDs with only few tracks). If you have such a CD you should start EAC (for that CD) with the command line option -nomultisession then. Also it is now possible to create CUE sheets with CD-Text additions (but I heard, that sometimes CDRWin does not create CD-Text CDs on such CUE sheets even if it does accept the CUE sheet).
I have now two domains that will be ready somewhen next week, so I will move… The new address for EAC will be http://www.ExactAudioCopy.de and my private homepage will be at http://www.Andre-Wiethoff.de. I will keep up this site a month or so and then all users will be redirected to the new pages automatically…

Again sorry, I just found another possible bug, that I just removed. It has to do again with some WAV files in the wave editor making EAC stop. It only happened when having selected “No use of null samples for CRC calculations”.
Further I corrected the bug with the CDDB batch function. It should now work also. So please download again that version… Sorry!
I think this is still not the “final” 0.85 beta version, as I want to fix the Toshiba/etc “Can’t find matching read mode” bug first… So keep updated 😉