I have to say that the official release has still too many bugs. Thats why I plan to release a “0.81” beta somewhen this week or next week.
The main bugs that should be removed then are these :

  • Error check works not correctly in 0.8beta! It will often not find errors even if there are some! Should already be removed by now. This bug occured after I rewrote many parts of the extraction methods and of the guessing routines. I just forgot to mark some kind of bad blocks as bad… :( The new extraction methods should nevertheless work with the same speed as before on good CDs.
  • Could not find matching read modes for some Philips and Toshiba drives.
  • Already removed the obsolete part that slowed down burst copy. Now it will copy on my Plex 14/32 with max 16.5X (accesses to harddisk too slow) and test tracks with something around 23.0X.
  • Some other smaller bugs, that will be removed as far as I now them…

Please note that the feature detection test is purely heuristical and does not always give back the correct results! So don’t trust them, if you know that your drive has other features!

Now here it is, the new official 0.8beta. 😉
It was really a long time without any updates, but I think it was worth the time. Even if it has no really big new features, but many improvements and bugfixes on nearly all functions.
The new version includes

  • New fast secure read modes for accurate readers and also for drives that caches
  • Complete improvement of read modes and Test read function, allowing to calculate CRC checksums without using disk space
  • BladeEnc DLL support
  • Remove leading and trailing silence
  • Fill missing offset samples with silence
  • Automatic detection of drive features
  • Selection of extensions for headerless WAV files
  • Test detected gaps on silence
  • Save extraction log
  • Selection of error recovery quality for faster extraction on bad CDs
  • WAV editor with already some functions for editing, more to come…
  • Many bugfixes, too many to mention

There are still many bugs, but I hope to remove them sooner or later. If EAC makes problems on your computer, please read the What’s New page.
I will do nothing on EAC the next week, but then work for 0.9beta will begin. Many people told me a lot of ideas of improvement. Because there were too much mail the last month, I would ask to tell me the not yet implemented ideas again, if not stated in the ‘Planned for next release’. But also experiences are appreciated!

I am sorry to say that the release date will be some days later. New expected release date will be the 22.1.98. The last weeks I had lot of work at the university and EAC also took much work to finish all features I planned for 0.8 beta. You will surely be surprised which features are now really in it… :)
I have to say the 0.8 beta will not have these announced features: Submission of CDDB entries, Support of other local CDDB databases and Proxy authentification. But I will try to include it in version 0.9 beta then.