[Paranoia] cdparanoia vs EAC

[xiphmont at xiph.org]

> The reason for using EAC instead of cdparanoia has been that EAC has
> been able to handle drives with caches, while cdparanoia hasn't.

Well, it's more that EAC expects drives can have bigger/different
caches than older Paranoia did.  A few more drives today also offer
command set ways to force media access, as opposed to attempting to
trick the drive into flushing cache via access patterns. But only a
few (and you can't rely on that).

Both EAC and Paranoia will still have the problem where a drive with a
completely different cache strategy can defeat them without either
knowing (thus bundling the new -A tests with cdparanoia that tries to
find these drives).

> Now I
> see that there is a new version (since September last year) which seem
> to be able to handle drives with caches.

Old paranoia did have cache-modelling code, but it had become out of
date since the last major update in 1998.  The new code incorporates
behavior modelling for recent drives.

> If I understand it correctly, cdparanoia is now able to handle drives
> with caches, just like EAC. Is this correct?

"Handle as many at least as well", I think so.  Again, I bundled the
test mode for a reason :-)  As EAC is closed, none of us really have
any idea what it is doing.

> I run the cdparanoia -A test on my drive, and it ended up with
> something like "Drive tests OK with Paranoia." Does this mean that the
> rips done with cdparanoia will be as accurate as the ones done with
> EAC?

Yes.

Monty