Credits

Easy CD-DA Extractor 3, Copyright © Jukka Poikolainen 1998

Apollo MP3 File Decoder by Heikki Ylinen

Blade's MP3 Encoder by Tord Jansson

ID3LIB by Dirk Mahoney

Silence Stripper by Dirk Mahoney & Jukka Poikolainen

Music CD-related data is provided throught the Internet from the Escient® CDDB(tm) Music CD Database.

Everything else by Jukka Poikolainen

Introduction

Easy CD-DA Extractor 3, as the name says; Enables you to easily copy digital audio from audio compact disc into your computer.

START

Click icon 'Easy CD-DA Extractor 3' to start Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 in ASPI for Win32 - mode. (for Windows 9x,  Windows NT, Windows 2000 and later)

Click icon 'Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 NT' to start Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 in NT-SCSI - mode. (Windows NT, Windows 2000 and later)

 

REQUIREMENTS

RECOMMENDATION

OPTIMAL

Check out the benchmark results @ Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 homepage.

 

COMPATIBILITY

Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 is designed for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. It uses ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface) to communicate with a CD device in Windows 9x. There is special NT Generic SCSI Interface support for Windows NT and Windows 2000 and later.

NOTE: Not all CD/DVD drives can do digital audio extraction. Some drives seem to read digital audio correctly but the sound quality is poor.

Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 is compatible with all ATAPI and SCSI-3 CD/DVD adevices. If you cannot read any track and you have a ATAPI/SCSI-3 drive, your drive does not support digital audio extraction and therefore cannot be used with Easy CD-DA Extractor 3.

Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 is also compatible with SCSI-2 devices. If there is a read error in every track the reason might be 1) Your drive does not support digital audio extraction 2) Your drive is not supported. Many SCSI devices are supported by Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 but compatibility with all SCSI-2 devices is not guaranteed.

PROBLEMS: If you are experiencing problems in digital audio extraction, try to decrease the reading speed and try to use software sector synchronization.

TESTING YOUR DRIVE

In order to test whether your drive is Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 compatible do the following

How to use it?

OUTPUT FORMAT

Formats that can be used without acquiring any external programs

Formats that require an external program

(copy the external program to the Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 installation folder or in a folder that is listed in the PATH environment variable)

OUTPUT FOLDER/FILENAME

If the artist name would be "The Smashing Pumpkins", the album would be "Adore" and the song would be "Perfect" which is the track number 3.Selected directory is "C:\My Audio Files"

"%a - %t\%i. %n" would produce filename "C:\My Audio Files\The Smashing Pumpkins - Adore\03. Perfect" (+file extension which depends of the selected file format)

"%a - %n" would produce filename "C:\My Audio Files\The Smashing Pumpkins - Perfect" (+file extension which depends of selected file format)

"Full Albums\%a\%t\%i. %n" would produce filename "C:\My Audio Files\Full Albums\The Smashing Pumpkins\Adore\03. Perfect" (+file extension which depends of selected file format)

"%n" would produce filename "C:\My Audio Files\Perfect" (+file extension which depends of selected file format)

"%i" would produce filename "C:\My Audio Files\03" (+file extension which depends of selected file format)

You got it? Make sure that there is no O/S reserved characters in the folder/filenames, illegal character would cause a file creation failure error. O/S reserved characters (Windows 9x, NT) are /, :, *, ?, ", <, > and |. You can map reserved characters to legal characters string from the Options / User Interface Settings.

ON-THE-FLY MODE

Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 can use "On-the-fly" mode, which means that audio data is converted on-the-fly to desired destination format. Normalization is not available in On-the-fly mode.

EXTRA HIGH QUALITY

Currently affects only Windows Audio Compression Manager (ACM), produces slightly better quality audio but is much more slower than normal mode if you are using some complex audio compression technique like MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer-3)

FILTERS

Normalization; Balances the loudness of the tracks. Useful when recording from a variety of different CDs that may have been recorded at different loudness levels.

Silence Stripper; Removes digital or analog silence from the beginning and from the end of the track. You can also specify the amount of silence to add to the start and to the end of the track.

Click eliminator; Some drives cannot do clean digital audio extraction, meaning that there might be one or few bytes wrong between two transfer region. It can be heared as a short click sound. This filter will kill such clicks.

ID3 TAG

ID3 Tag is an extension to the MP3 specification. ID3 Tag contains information such as title, artist, album, images etc.

Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 conforms to ID3 Tag Version 2.3.0 (ID3V2), more information about ID3 at http://www.id3.org.

PRIORITY BOOST

Increases/Decreases the processor time given to the extraction/filtering/conversion/compression routine.

Settings

CDDB

CDDB (CD database) is an information database containing artist, disc title, track titles, and other information for digital audio compact discs. A number of CDDB server hosts have been set up onthe Internet around the world, and Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 running on a system which isconnected to the Internet can connect to one or more CDDB servers and query the CD database information.

More information about CDDB at http://www.cddb.com

Hit the "Get List" to get list of active CDDB servers from CDDB mainsite at cddb.cddb.com:888. This function uses direct CDDBP connection and therefore may not work behind a firewall. If you cannot use "Get List" function, use your Internet Browser to connect www.cddb.com to see current list of active CDDB servers.

Select the server you want to use (you may want to use the server that is near you, it's probably fastest). If you are not behind a firewall CDDBP protocol is the recommended protocol to use. If you are behind a firewall you should probably use HTTP protocol thru a Proxy Server:

CD DEVICE OPTIONS

Sectors Per Read; Simply specifies how many sectors should be read at a time. You can change this value and see if it affects the performance of extraction process.

Number Of Retries; Specifies how many times extractor tries to read a sector if read error occurs.

Sector Synchronization; Used to correct synchroniazation failures. Some drives (almost all newer ones) has special chip that synchronizes audio automatically when doing digital audio extraction. Some (older) drives has no such a feature, software synchronization has to used with these drives.

Some drives cannot position the laser exactly to the requested position. The data returned does not belong exactly to the requested position. This is heared as click and pop sounds in the extracted audio. You can kill those extra sounds by using Sector Synchronization which performs overlapped reads and reconstructs the full sectors. First, try to use two-sector sync. and test if the sound is good, if you still hear those extra noises try three-sector sync. and so on. Not many drives require Sector Synchronization now-a-days (only older ones). Sector Synchronization is always (much more) slower than normal mode.

Track Offset; Some CD drives don't correctly extract digital audio if the pregap of the first track isn't exactly two seconds. A bug in the firmware causes the drive to start extracting slightly past the start of the track, and stop extracting slightly past the end. This can result in an audible glitch if the music starts at the exact start of the track, and can cause the drive to fail with an error when extracting the last track on the CD.

For example, if the first track started at 00:02.32, you would subtract 32 from the start and the end.

The Yamaha CDR-100/102 and the Philips CDD2600 are known to have this problem, though it may get fixed by a firmware update. The Ricoh 6200S reportedly does not return the disc's table of contents correctly for these sorts of discs.

Swap Left And Right Channel; Some drives return incorrectly the left and right channel, you can swap them back to good with this option on.

Disable 'Buffer Overflow' Checking; If you are getting 'Buffer Overflow' errors all the time, you can disable the buffer overflow checking and extracts tracks without it.

Reverse Byte Order; Some drives return the digital audio data in the low-endian byte order, the sound is only static use this option to correct it.

USER INTERFACE SETTINGS

Highlight track titles when the mouse passes over them; Check this option to have visual feedback when mouse passes over a track name.

Show tips at startup; Enables the tips at program startup. Might be useful for non-experienced users.

Filename generation; Enables you to re-map O/S reserved to characters to legal character strings.

MISCELLANEOUS OPTIONS

Run Easy CD-DA Extractor @ higher priority; Automatically puts the Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 to the high-priority mode. Windows will give more processor time to the Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 process.

Play a sound at the end of extraction process; Notifies user that the extraction is complete by playing a wave (.wav) sound.

Tools

WAVE NORMALIZER

You can normalize standard Wave (16-bit Stereo PCM @ 44.1kHz) files using this tool.

FILE CONVERTER

You can convert standard Wave (16-bit Stereo PCM @ 44.1kHz) files to some other format using this tool.

DATABASE BROWSER

You can browse the Windows CD-database using this tool. Shows all albums and tracks.

APOLLO MP3 DECODER

Decodes MP3 (MPEG Layer-3 Audio) to standard wave (.wav, PCM)  format.

ALL TOOLS ARE VERY SIMPLE TO USE, JUST TRY THEM!