Problem with Plextor drives and 3.310

[a2kmike]

Songpony.....seen this in the Hoster Help area of Forum

Originally Posted by admin

I believe you have an older Plextor drive that doesn't support MODERN RAWDAO96 operations. Hoster 3.303 didn't use RAWDAO96, which is why it worked fine with your old drive.

Hoster 3.310 uses RAWDAO96 to communicate with MANY, MANY, MANY drives, since Plextor is the ONLY drive maker today supporting the older CDG commands.

I see two simple solutions to your problem:

1. Reinstall Hoster 3.303 and be happy with it and your older drive.

2. Buy a new MODERN drive that supports RAWDAO96 operations and use Hoster 3.310 and be happy.

does this shed light on your situatuation?? it does mine.....it kinda says use 3.303 or buy another drive ...huh...that 's what I get!!

MIke Summitt

[ddouglass]

A2KMike and Songpony please keep in mind that MTU doesn't write the drive interface code for the program themselves, but get it from a third party vendor. This is not to excuse or dismiss the problem and I know it is still an issue MTU is trying to resolve. Sometimes it takes time to resolve issues like this.
With this last upgrade of Hoster, MTU expanded the number of CD/DVD drives usable even more. Unfortunately, for what ever reason the people who wrote the new MMC coding leftout or changed something in the code that only allows for RAWDAO96 format instead of choosing the correct interface for the drive in question.
MTU is not the only one to do this kind of thing...just look at the things Microsoft does to us!! And we take it in stride.

Give them some time and hopefully a cure will be found. Mean while if you have room try another non-Plextor for your singer imports, keeping the Plextor to do disc imports.

Admin has been talking about another upgrade before the end of the year, so keep your fingers crossed.

[admin]

SongPony, you need to visit the Microstudio Beta 10 Thread (you can see it because you are a Microstudio Beta Tester ) and download the test file in post #23 (page 2). Follow the instructions.

Please post your results in the Beta Testers thread as this is experimental and the results are private.

For the others of you posted in this Thread, know that we are actively seeking a solution on our own. Our "vendor" that supplied the drive interface code is not responding fast enough to our liking. We recognize there is a problem with Plextor drives, and hope our "test" will turn out to be the solution.

We'll make any successful results public. If it fails, we'll try something else until we solve the problem.

[a2kmike]

Well.....after two and a half months I finally receive a straightforward answer concerning this problem....many thanks ddouglas and admin.

I am now waiting in anticipation of a cure for these four plextor drives I have. I wish you guys luck in finding a cure soon, I know you have the skill so a little luck may be all that's needed.

Thanks again

Mike Summitt

[songpony]

Admin - just got back in town so will give it a try and post results. Thanks.

[admin]

We got a new SDK from our vendor that allows us to access the raw data feed from the CD/DVD drive. With this, we can stop the software error correction they were doing, when the Plextor drives already did it! That's what is damaging the songs from Plextors. Things were up and running Friday, but the lyrics are blank. Sometimes things don't come easy!

We're back on it today. This will be in Hoster 3.312 which will be a free upgrade for 3.3xx owners. We're trying to release this and Microstudio 3.000 (has the same import problem with Plextors) before the end of October. This is the biggy we must solve, then a bunch of small bug fixes.

[admin]

Originally Posted by admin

We got a new SDK from our vendor that allows us to access the raw data feed from the CD/DVD drive. With this, we can stop the software error correction they were doing, when the Plextor drives already did it! That's what is damaging the songs from Plextors. Things were up and running Friday, but the lyrics are blank. Sometimes things don't come easy!

We're back on it today. This will be in Hoster 3.312 which will be a free upgrade for 3.3xx owners. We're trying to release this and Microstudio 3.000 (has the same import problem with Plextors) before the end of October. This is the biggy we must solve, then a bunch of small bug fixes.

After struggling with the new SDK for several days, we called our vendor. It turns out they only communicate with ALL CD/DVD drives in RAWDAO96 mode. They never even send the command to the drive to provide hardware error corrected data, like Plextor drives have.

In Hoster 3.303, we wrote our own source code to read tracks from CD drives. It allowed reading from hardware error correcting drives (plextor is the only one today) OR from other drives using software error correction (which was inferior to the hardware corrected data). That currently is NOT available in Hoster 3.310 - 3.312 as we are using our vendors code to both identify and read/write data with MANY MANY MANY more CD/DVD drives. It is a tradeoff we are not happy about as you can see below.

OUR CURRENT DIRECTION... is to improve our 3.303 Reed Solomon error correction software so it can correct not only 1- and 2-byte errors in the RW code (appear as graphic flecks), but also 3- and 4-byte errors (appears as really bad fleck). It also turns out we may have discovered a bug when processing a 2-byte error. If so, then just fixing this alone will make a world of difference.

We are hoping for the new code from our contractor by Friday, October 20 so we can be beta testing it over that weekend.