DAGRAB - an audio cd grabber for linux. (C) 1998,2000 Marcello Urbani <murbani@libero.it> DISCLAIMER: The author DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE.In no event shall I be liable for any kind of damage arising with the using of this software. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Use with caution,as this program is a 'quick and dirty' hack with poor error checking. NOTE: This program may not be used to circumvent copyrights. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- DAGRAB is a program for reading audio tracks from a cdrom drive into wav sound files. It should work with any cdrom drive,provided that digital audio extraction is supported from both the drive and its linux driver, but is only tested with IDE cdroms. For an index of cdrom drives that supports digital audio extraction, take a look at these URLs: <http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~psyche/pc/cdrom/CDDA.html> and <http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-cd/cdda-list.html> Many IDE/ATAPI drives supports it, but many don't. This program is just a hack i wrote because i haven't found a similar program that worked good on my system. I think the problem is that the linux ide-cd driver only reads 8 sectors a time, so that any attempt to read more results in jitter inside the block. This assumption is supported from the fact that cdda2wav worked good on my system if used with the option -n 8.Too bad, I only noticed it when my program was almost finished. You can dramatically speed up audio extraction with both dagrab and cdda2wav by patching your kernel setting CDROM_NBLOCKS_BUFFER to a higher value (32 seems to be a good choice) and reading more sectors at a time. NOTE: don't use sectors per request higher than CDROM_NBLOCKS_BUFFER unless you own one of the few drives that don't require jitter correction. Sometimes, it makes a few jitter correction errors/track, but i usually can't hear them in playback. CDDB support is not well tested. Please e-mail me if you notice a serious bug (I mean dangerous ones).