.....Jackie.....
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.
