OFF CD burner software

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 11:12:07PM +0100, Alasdair Macdonald wrote:
> EAC is free and is highly recommended for extraction of audio from
> source audio CDs - it claims to be the *only* software capable of
> *exact* copies.

Getting back an exact copy of a CD's data isn't straightforward,
because the CD-audio format was never designed to guarantee a
perfect read, only to be good-enough-for-audio.  (This wasn't
for copy protection, I don't think, but just that the technology
wasn't good enough.)

So a copy of a CD won't be exact unless you take special pains
(and maybe not even then).  Still, this program's claim to be
the "*only* software" that can do it is as dubious as such
claims usually are.

Some CD-ROM drives are supposed to be better at extracting audio
than others; Plextor, among others, has a good reputation.

Take what I say with a grain of salt, by the way; I've never
done this, only read about it.  See the CD-ROM FAQ:
        ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/cdrom/cd-recordable/

Section [3-2], "How do I extract tracks from, or copy all of, an
audio CD?", has some more URLs.

(As an aside, CD-ROM does have to be perfect, of course, so it
has another level of error correction on top of what audio has.
Specifically, each block of a CD has 2352 bytes of usable data
space, and there's other low-level error-detection/correction
data stored besides that.  An audio CD uses all 2352 bytes for
sound samples; a CD-ROM uses some for the extra high-level
error-correction data (ie. to correct the errors that weren't
already caught by the low-level stuff), leaving 2048 bytes for
user data.)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
to me, Charlie Brown represented the courage to be sincere in the face of
ridicule. he was NOT a loser.
thank you, Mr. Schulz.
        - Robert C. Mayo