new project ???

[lykose]

hi sbooth,
you mentioned some time ago that u´ll start working on a "new project". i know that you will post something about it when you think it´s time for.
me (and i guess some other more) just curious about what direction it will be. maybe some little words and thoughts about it?

[sbooth]

Sure!

It is a CD ripper with the following features:

• Drive read offset support
• AccurateRip support
• Multiple metadata sources [via plugins], including MusicBrainz, FreeDB and iTunes
• Plugin-based encoders

I've currently completed maybe 70% of the features, and plan a public beta soon.

[lykose]

thank you for your words. this sounds very interesting. i´ll keep my fingers crossed for this project.

[Macman4hire]

Will the new CD ripper have the ability to disable the drives cache? Their seems to be some disagreement if this is possible using CDParanoia on Mac platform. A CD ripper called XLD has a feature to disable the cache and some people think that it is not possible. Do you know if a test can confirm or deny this feature? Do think you it can be accomplished? Thank you for hard work.

[sbooth]

Will the new CD ripper have the ability to disable the drives cache? Their seems to be some disagreement if this is possible using CDParanoia on Mac platform. A CD ripper called XLD has a feature to disable the cache and some people think that it is not possible. Do you know if a test can confirm or deny this feature? Do think you it can be accomplished? Thank you for hard work.

As far as I know there is no way to disable a drive's cache on OS X, short of writing your own SCSI driver.

I am familiar with XLD and have looked at the source code used for cache disabling in it; I can't say with 100% certainty but I don't think it will work as advertised.

[Fuga]

I am familiar with XLD and have looked at the source code used for cache disabling in it; I can't say with 100% certainty but I don't think it will work as advertised.

What do you think it thinks it's doing? I am not doubting you. I would just like to hear any one expand on this.

[sbooth]

XLD uses

Code: Select all

fcntl(fd,F_NOCACHE,disable);

which as far as I know disables caching at the kernel, not device, level.

[Macman4hire]

Thanks for your reply sbooth. What about solutions to this problem such as different or modified hardware and firmware modifications to CD/DVD drives.
I read CDParanoia that a CD cache solution is to increase the read ahead value. What is your opinion on this approach?

[Fuga]

Thanks for your reply sbooth. What about solutions to this problem such as different or modified hardware and firmware modifications to CD/DVD drives.
I read CDParanoia that a CD cache solution is to increase the read ahead value. What is your opinion on this approach?

Hey! I was just about to ask that.
And, yes, thanks, sbooth, for the information, and for the continued development.

[sbooth]

Thanks for your reply sbooth. What about solutions to this problem such as different or modified hardware and firmware modifications to CD/DVD drives.
I read CDParanoia that a CD cache solution is to increase the read ahead value. What is your opinion on this approach?

I am not familiar enough with the paranoia internals to know if adjusting the read ahead value has any effect- I've heard differing opinions.

One sure way to defeat caching, if it is something you really want to do, is to purchase a drive that doesn't cache!

[khead]

FWIW - After spending a lot of time trying several different caching and non caching drives with CDParanoia I'd say the caching issue is overblown the way it's treated in most forums.
Not having a cache doesn't make CDParanoia work perfect, and having a cache doesn't make it useless.

You get better rips on problem disks using CDParanoia than iTunes, cache or no cache.

I returned one of my non caching drives, and the other one sits idle.
I have a couple of caching drives that I use with either MAX, iTunes ..... and now XLD ...... that work very well.

Having Accurate Rip is great!

[Macman4hire]

FWIW - After spending a lot of time trying several different caching and non caching drives with CDParanoia I'd say the caching issue is overblown the way it's treated in most forums.
Not having a cache doesn't make CDParanoia work perfect, and having a cache doesn't make it useless.

You get better rips on problem disks using CDParanoia than iTunes, cache or no cache.

I returned one of my non caching drives, and the other one sits idle.
I have a couple of caching drives that I use with either MAX, iTunes ..... and now XLD ...... that work very well.

Having Accurate Rip is great!

khead the question I have for you based on your experience does having a drive that does not cache perform any better than a drive that does cache with CDParanoia? I agree that CDParanoia is not useless if your drive caches. What I would like to know is if CDParanoia performs better, even if its a marginal performance increase whether by hardware or software design implementation. I will then have a choice in how to configure and use my system in the most effective way based on criteria that is important to me(audio quality).

[khead]

Crap!

I just typed out a long response and got logged out while doing it and lost the whole thing!

I'll try again later.

[Fuga]

Crap!

I just typed out a long response and got logged out while doing it and lost the whole thing!

I'll try again later.

DO PLEASE!

Yes, I'm yelling.

[Macman4hire]

Greats about the drive cache and CDParanoia!

September 11, 2008

cdparanoia 10.2 final released

10.2 is a substantial upgrade release over 10.1.

10.2 includes a raft of minor bugfixes in device scan, device autosense and the transport layer.

More importantly, 10.2 addresses serious CDROM drive cache modelling deficiencies that exist in earlier versions. In a nutshell, a sizable fraction of modern drives exhibit new and exciting readahead cache abuses/bugs of which older versions of cdparanoia were not fully aware. This means that skips and cracks could slip through the cache management strategy of older versions completely undetected. 10.2 fully addresses and models these new cache behaviors.

10.2 also includes a cache analysis option (-A) to do a slow and thorough offline check of the drive's cache behavior. The feature also dumps a detailed log to assist in debugging should either the test or cdparanoia's ripping go awry in any way. After all... better thoroughly safe than sorry.

sbooth will MAX use this latest release of CDParanoia in the next version of MAX?