There are two new things, both found under the CD menu. First we have a fix for copy protected discs under CD, Detect TOC. It has become more and more common with discs that says "This cd will not play on PC/MAC". The cd manufacturers has put an extra Table Of Contents (TOC) on the disc and this often fools a computer CD-ROM drive so the tracklist is messed up. Tracks are marked as datatracks and with incorrect start and stop times.

Audiograbber has now two alternative ways to get a correct TOC. The first is called Get TOC from subcodes. In this function Audiograbber looks all over the discs and tries to find out where the tracks really starts and stops. This can take a while so a status indicator is showing what is going on.
Many CD-ROM drives refuses to access the disc at all in a sector higher than what it belives is the lead out area (the highest sector on the disc). Some discs is made so the lead out area is set to a very low value, such as 224 when it actually should be somewhere around 300,000. In this case the TOC detection will fail.
Another way to find the correct TOC is to look at the session info and Audiograbber can do this too. This way the CD-ROM drive should not at all care about incorrect TOC information stored in a second or third session of the disc but once again it works only with some CD-ROM drives.

Plextor drives seems to be good at finding a correct TOC via these two alternative methods. I have also a HP cd-burner and that one gets a correct TOC all the times without troubles and I have an AOpen DVD drive that also gets an almost correct TOC but has the lead out area way too low and thus refuses to read anything above the lead out area. In short, get yourself a Plextor drive and you should be able to rip copy protected discs now with Audiograbber. A firmware upgrade may help for other CD-ROM drives.

The second new function is that Audiograbber can now rip karaoke tracks from CDG discs. I really like this function myself since I have a karaoke machine! There are two kind of karaoke cd's, one is SVCD which is basically MPG films on a cd. These can easily be copied with Windows explorer so no cd-ripper is needed for them. The other is CDG (the most common karaoke cd's) and very few programs can copy tracks from CDG discs but now Audiograbber can also do that. In order to test this function you need a CDG disc and a CD-ROM drive that can copy CDG discs, not all drives can do that. Most CD burners seems to be able to copy CDG tracks though. And once again Plextor drives are good for this.

Let me explain a bit about CDG discs. A regular frame (sector) on an audio disc is 2352 bytes. It is also possible to store subcode data to each sector and CDG info is stored in subcode R to W. It fits 96 bytes of data in these subcodes and that is used for graphic info. It is not plain text that is stored in the subcodes, instead it is graphics that builds up the picture with lyrics. If a regular cd player plays a CDG disc is simply ignores the sub channel data and it plays as a normal music cd (without song of course since there is usually no vocals on a karaoke disc).

The data on a CDG discs (audio and graphics) can be used in a few different ways in a computer. The easiest is to rip to a .bin file which is a copy of what is on the original disc. This bin file can later be burnt to a new CDG disc so you can make your own compilation CDG's. A .bin file consists of audio mixed with graphics data.

It is also possible to rip to a .wav + a .cdg file. This way you have the audio in one file and the graphics in another. Or you can rip to a .cdg file + an .mp3 file with the audio. There are audio players that can play these .wav files or .mp3 files and at the same time display the graphics/lyrics. There are also programs that can split a .bin file into a .wav and a .cdg file and can combine a .wav and a .cdg file to a .bin file.

Here are some links to other useful CDG programs:

http://www.goldenhawk.com . This is CDRWin, a good cd-burner program that can make new CDG discs from .bin files. (There is also a German company that makes another program named CDRWin to complicate things. This is the real and original CDRWin program with version 3.9. Avoid the German CDRWin program with version number 4 and 5!)
A good thing with CDRWin is that it allows cd-burning even in the unregistered version although limited to 1x burning speed.

http://pages.infinit.net/belier/ . Here you will find a very good freeware CDG plugin for Winamp (both version 2 and 3). When Winamp plays a song (mp3, wma, ogg, wav or whatever) this plugin checks if there is a file with the same name and the extension .cdg. If there is it displays the graphics from the cdg file while Winamp plays.

http://www.dartpro.com . Dart has their Karaoke Studio/CD+G program which can do a lot of things with CDG tracks. It can remove vocals from a song and you can make your own cdg data and that way make your own karaoke tracks and burn them to cd's for example. This is a 30 day trial version.

http://www.powerkaraoke.com . PowerKaraoke, a program that can play .cdg files and .bin files. It can also make and edit .cdg files. Seems to be a good and useful program.

http://www.editcdg.com . This one can edit cdg files and it seems to be a well written freeware program.

http://www.karaokebuilder.com . KaraokeBuilder can among other things split .bin files into .wav and .cdg and merge them together again.
Tips: save your karaoke tracks as .mp3 and a corresponding .cdg file. When you want to make a new karaoke disc then decode the mp3 to wav, merge the wav and cdg to .bin with Karaoke builder and burn a new disc with CDRWin (I am not sure if Nero also can make cdg discs but maybe someone can enlighten me? Dart's program can also do it anyhow).

High priority for next version has secure ripping, I have not forgot about that guys!
(And I would like to ship the ogg dll's with the final 1.82 but I need to test a bit more with that first).

[This message has been edited by Jackie on 04 October 2002 @ 03:27]

Just wanna add that you might wanna stop by http://www.karaokeplayground.co.uk/ for more karaoke info. Also, they have a program called "MP3+G Toolz" that makes binfiles from MP3+CDG and vice versa.

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moonroy

www.mp3.com/enuresis

Christof

quote:

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Originally posted by drosoph:
When can we expect some of those .OGG improvements that were mentioned in previous threads ??? (I think you were going to start using the 4 separate DLLs and look into some speed improvements ??? )

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As Jackie said, that will be in the full 1.82. Right now in this first beta the most important stuff to be tested by the community were the TOC detection and the karaoke stuff (CD+G). It is a lot of work behind those functions. Don't forget to send feedback to Jackie about it! The OGG support is on its way. The last version (1.81) was in beta phase for 2 months. Hopefully this won't take that long.

I am not sure about that secure mode in 1.90. Probably it will just, at first, re-read the sectors until two or more same values show up. Later on I am sure Jackie will add a logical anylyze method that actually checks what kind of data was ripped, and if it "fits the waveform". If you have any knowledge in the area I guess Jackie will appreciate your ideas.

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moonroy

www.mp3.com/enuresis

So far, 1.82 does seem to do a better job of detecting the max speed on my Plextor drive. 1.81 used to detect 40x for a while, then only 8x for a while. It would just back and forth all during a single session of ripping. The drive is a 24/10/40A.

It looks like the "24/10/40a" is a plextor.
I have the same drive and I never noticed this.
Strange.....

I don't get it. Some setups work fine and some get the immediate close after eject. The curious thing is that with my setup at home, 1.80 build 2 works fine, but builds after that all get the bounce.

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Please submit your working CD-drive, check this topic.

@Spaceknarf
Yes I had that to.
And sometimes it was even 8x speed.
When I put another that worked on 40x ,then the max speed is 40x.
Then I change back and it is again 8x.
So it must be the CD I think

Bob

But no, the main window still only supports ID3v1 and that standard does not allow any changes in genres.

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moonroy

www.mp3.com/enuresis