[paranoia] Drive recommendation, and error correction

[Monty]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 03:36:27PM +0100, James Mansion wrote:
> I note that various major labels are starting to
> distribute CDs which have deliberate error patterns
> that cause CD players to interpolate.
> 
> Can/will paranoia be able to interpolate in the same
> way?

Cdparanoia, currently, allows the drive to do it (most do, many
don't).  It does not yet have any explicit 'track errors and
interpolate' code, although that layer will have to exist soon.  At
least one company has offered to contract the work to make cdparanoia
capable of breaking all the 'secure CD' systems :-)

(They make CD players that play CDs by extracting them and then doing
signal processing on the audio before sending it out.  A perfectly
legit use...)

> Is it necessary to use drives with a particular capability
> to achieve this?

The answer is 'probably'.  cdparanoia II was able to
interpolate/repair disks on drives incapable of reporting ECC errors,
but it only worked correctly on 50% or fewer drives.  III does not
have the feature because making the feature relaible across most
drives wasn't a problem I'd solved.  It's not impossible or even hard,
but I've not yet had the time to do it.

> I find that the 20x CD-ROM in my Gateway 9100 will
> reliably fill every status with '+' (well, except for
> the odd '!') and ripping takes an age.  The results
> are OK, it has to be said.
> 
> Can anyone recommend a drive that will rip quickly
> and reliably?

Plextor is unsurpassed on undamaged disks.  A few recent firmware
revisions have had more trouble (than I expect from Plextor) with
damaged media.  Plextor also supports ECC reporting, so that
near-perfect reconstruction of audio discs protected with systems like
Cactus will be easy.

> I'd like to replace the front end of my hifi with a
> DSP solution, but getting at the audio data is proving
> harder than I expected.

Yes, yes it is.  I had thought, about a year ago, that cdparanoia
would become unneeded soon as the general firmware quality of CD/DVDROM
drives was improving.

Then this.  "Oh well"

Monty

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