What's New 02/01/98
CDDA32 Version 1.0 Released
Finally the long awaited 1.0 release is available. It brings a long list of new features and bug fixes.- there are now separate sections in the INI file for each drive found in the system - this will allow each drive to use a different configuration if needed
- will dump out any Artist/Title information stored on the CD - the blue book option will dump the information stored on CDs labeled CD-Enhanced, CD-Extra, CD-Plus
- the CD-Text option will dump the information stored on special CDs usually only the newest from Sony and requires a Sony 711 drive
- will dump out to TRACKS.DMP a full list of tracks and times for all the CDs in the machine - if run with the /Q option then it is
- the CDDAINIT program now a lot more robust and should do a much better job of configuring the INI file
- there is a new command line option called /OFFSET which takes an integer and will add/subtract an offset value to the start and end times of a track - this was done as a fix for the Toshiba 6002 drive which will not let you grab from the last track unless you change the start time by +- one frame
- updates have been made to the speed control to support some of the new MMC compliant CDR SCSI drives, and some of the new Toshiba drives
- there have been a lot of changes to the code to properly support Windows NT
- we have spent quite a bit of time making sure that the code runs very well under Windows 98 Beta3(1650)
- machines with poor quality drives would sometimes get GPFs
- we have been doing a lot more work on dealing with some of the "bad"drives - the Goldstar 580 & Hitach 7730 are particularly bad and appear to have chipset bugs similar to the Oak911 bug, but not the same - it appears that the fixes we have put in CDDA32 for the Oak911 bug don't help a whole lot for this other bug - as best we can tell this bug may not have a workaround - we have started calling this the Oak910 bug because that is the part number of the chipset in the Goldstar drive
CD-Text FAQ updated
There is a growing interest in the new CD standard called CD-Text which allows album titles, artist names, track names and images to be stored in some previously unused portions of regular audio CDs. There are many home audio CD players available now that will already handle these CDs, and surprisingly there are a large number of audio CDs available now with CD-Text.The news on CD-Text is that Sony has released a new CD-Rom drive that supports reading the information stored on the CDs. Up to this point there were no drives available that properly support CD-Text. Sony Japan has also opened their own CD-Text information site. Make sure you have a look at the cute little cartoons.
