From: Nix <nix_at_esperi.org.uk>
Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2004 01:45:14 +0000

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Fred Maxwell spake:
>> cdex does everything eac does and it is open source to boot.
>
> No, cdex does not do everything that EAC does. Its error detection and
> correction is practically non-existent.
>
> http://doc.hydrogenaudio.org/wikis/hydrogenaudio/SecureAudioExtraction

That author's copy of cdparanoia/libparanoia/cdex seems to me to be
severely broken. It's as though cdparanoia's not being used at all.

For me, cdparanoia has sucked data pretty much intact (no artifacts that
I could detect) off the following:

- somewhat scratched CDs
- CD-Rs that had been left in the sun for a year (oops)
- CDs that had been horribly scratched by an overinquisitive child
  with a metal brush
- CDs that had been coated with, um, unidentifiable acidic goo
  including coca-cola (children again)

I've heard of people getting audio back from things like CDs snapped in
two with cdparanoia, but I can't vouch for the quality of that audio.

Some of this depends on your CD-ROM drive, and on the OS: Linux's
ide-scsi driver doesn't properly report all SCSI errors to the IDE
layer, so some errors will not be properly apparent to cdparanoia. This
is Linux's fault: the solution (as of 2.6.x) is not to use ide-scsi at
all.

-- 
As they say, build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a
path to your door. But nobody ever got anywhere outlawing mice.

Received on 2004-01-04