The very popular shareware audio ripper and file convertor joins the small pack of audio ripping programs that offer some kind of secured or verified ripping mode. Exact Audio Copy has been the pioneer in this field and some time ago CDEx incorporated the CDDA Paranoia ripping routines. One can enable the secured reading in Options->Settings->CD-reader->Read mode<. We did a quick test of this feature, using a badly scratched original audio CD. The disc was ripped twice and the resulted WAV files were compared bit-by-bit. Unfortunately the files were not identical, and using EAC's "Compare WAV" feature we found a lot of differences in several tracks. We also listened through the ripped album and audibly it seemed to sound ok. There was limited time for the listening though, so further testing is needed. Get it from: http://cd-rw.org/software/audio_software/cd-da_extractors/easy_cdda_extractor.cfm I would be very interested in your experiences with this, and I can forward the feedback to the developer.
I ran a short test in order to see if the secure mode of EasyCD-DA Extractor 5.1 could stand the comparison with, for example EAC. I used some of my dead CDRs. One that I can't read twice and get the same wav file, because of read errors. There are no scratches on it, it just turned unreadable over time. The track number 10 was still good enough for the Teac e540 drive to read it perfectly : EAC secure mode, no C2, cache, accurate. 100 % Quality, no errors occured, CRC OK. This will be our reference file. The test is run with the memorex DVD Maxx 1648 drive, that can't read this CD without errors. EAC Secure C2 no cache accurate : no errors occured. However, substracting the file from the reference, we can see that some read errors occured : Reading again, still no errors, but the CRC is different from the previous one. The errors are in the Memorex extraction, not in the reference file. This comes from the use of C2, let's read without C2 : EAC Secure no C2 no cache, accurate : impossible to get an error free extraction : EAC reports read and sync errors. Now, let's see how EasyCD-DA performs. EasyCD-DA 5.1, set on "error recovery and repair" : extraction completed successfully. Here are the differences with the reference file : Another extraction shows about the same amount of differences with this one (compared between them), therefore we can't say that EasyCD-DA is right and EAC wrong. Conclusion The same as for CDP32 : I don't see the use of a secure mode if I must listen to all the CD I extract in order to know if there were audible errors. EAC, without C2, even warns about inaudible errors, undetectable with EasyCD-DA extractor.
