Problem with Plextor drives and 3.310

[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.