[Paranoia] Re: CD Ripping Uncertainty Again

[Monty]

On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 07:13:01PM -0500, Alex wrote:
> which uses a customized version of cdparanoia for ripping. However, it 
> still does not rip securely. It may be that disabling the cache (if 
> that's what the problem is) is quite difficult to achieve -- see this 
> discussion
> 
> <http://sbooth.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=33>

Until recently, there was no way whatsoever to disable/dump the cache
on an IDE CDROM drive; the command simply didn't exist.  It was a
feature only SCSI CDROMs had.

Since the last major CDParanoia work (in 1999), cache control commands
have been added to the MMC spec (which is the merger of IDE ATAPI and
SCSI), but like with most other aspects of ATAPI, IDE drives are still
free to ignore the command or just pretend to support it.

Previously, CDparanoia tried to thrash the cache, which worked to an
extent back in the days of 1M buffers on CDROMs.  The buffers have
gotten larger, but I don't think the cache thrashing attempts of
cdparanoia have been increased to account for that.

I also don't know if the MMC cache control commands have been added to
the cache control commandset.

These are inital places to start.

Monty