Cygon’s Blog

It all started when my old Plextor PX-712 SA burned DVDs that a friend of mine was unable to read. Several months later, it would not even read plain DVDs anymore (normal pressed DVDs). It was still good for CD ripping, so whenever I wanted to watch a movie, I just ripped it on my other computer, moved the ripped files to a network share and watched it via ethernet.

Wednesday, I decided to restore my drive image because my Vista installation is acting strange. I burned my imaging boot CD to an old CD-R and tried to boot from it. It failed, again and again.

The Plextor drive was really good, but with only 2 years in service, its life expectancy seems quite low. Today, I replaced it with a Pioneer DVR-215D in the hope that Pioneer’s drives might be better (I chose the exact model referencing the AccurateRip Drive Database to find one that would be able to do perfect CD audio rips just like my Plextor drive.

- I cannot set the ripping speed to anything else than 40.0x. Although I know that it’s supposed to be a myth that drives work more accurate at lower speeds, at least for the Plextor drive, that myth held true.

- The drive’s C2 error detection seems to work well. All my CDs are as good as new (since I never use them, I rip them once and put them away), so this may be a moot point.

- Enabling EAC’s “overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out” seems to be a very bad idea for this drive. Whenever I enable that option, I get sync errors and suspicious sectors for the final track of a CD. Changing virtually any setting leads to a different checksum.

- The EAC offset test CD calculates a read offset of +8 (tested 5 times, always the same), but the AccurateRip Drive Database indicates that the read offset is +48. I’m baffled as to what’s going on here.

All in all, the drive seems to be capable of doing accurate CD audio rips and, although I’m wishing that I had bought a Plextor drive again, I think I’ll keep it.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Audiere is a well designed multi-platform audio library. It incorporates Dumb (for mod playback), FLAC (lossless audio playback), libogg/libvorbis (ogg vorbis playback), Speex (special speech compression) and supports some formats on its own (including .mp3 and .wav of course). And the best part yet: it’s free and open source.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with native x64 applications. My experiences have been very positive so far: Basically any library that provides its source code could be compiled to x64 binaries with very few changes.

Source Patches

Audiere was no different. There was some assembly in FLAC 1.2.1 and libvorbis 1.2.0 that I had to patch, a small WinAPI pointer issue in Audiere and some more minor things. Here are the patches containing my changes:

Download: Patch for libvorbis 1.2.0 fixing all x64 issues
Download: Patch for FLAC 1.2.1 fixing all x64 issues
Download: Audiere 1.9.4 fixes and x64 patch

Visual C++ 2008 Binaries

You can find precompiled, optimized binaries for Visual C++ 2008 in my Subversion repository:

https://devel.nuclex.org/external/svn/audiere/tags/1.9.4-r1

The binaries have been compiled with Visual C++ 2008, all contained libraries targeting the Multithreaded DLL runtime, so you’ll need the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime (x86, x64) to use them. If you have Visual C++ 2008 installed, you already have the runtime.

Demo Application

If you just want to see whether this truly works, here’s a quick command-line audio player (plays .wav, .mp3, .ogg, .flac and .mod) in both x86 and x64 incarnations. The x64 version only works if you’re running Windows XP x64 or Windows Vista x64, of course:

Download: Audiere x64 demo application
Requires the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime [x86, x64] to work!

Enjoy!

I’m just listening to some of my favorite songs on a new Creative Labs X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series sound card. Despite all the trouble with Creative Labs, after the price dropped to a reasonable level, I decided to go for the X-Fi.

As a side effect, I now can download official up-to-date drivers directly from Creative Labs. To get the newest drivers from Creative Labs, you need to have the newest product from Creative Labs. Too bad you need the latest drivers to get anywhere.

On Windows Vista x64, I couldn’t notice any chance in sound quality. The X-Fi sounds exactly like my Audigy 2 in every detail. Also had some blue screens again. I’m not giving up yet, I had planned a recreation of my backup image with Windows Vista x64 SP1 for some time now, maybe this is the right time to do it and get rid of any possible left-behinds of the Audigy driver.

On Windows XP, the installer had some trouble, but after that, the X-Fi sounded very different from the Audigy 2. I haven’t fully made up my mind yet, but I think I can make out more detail in the music than before. I’ll have to see whether this is actually due to better mixing quality or some stupid psychoacoustic music coloring technique (CMSS and Crystalizer are disabled, of course).

It can drive my Sennheiser HD-650 pretty good without any preamp. I’m not listening at a very loud level, but at least on WinXP, the output level is quite a bit higher than what I was used from the Audigy 2.

When it comes to music archival, I’m somewhat of a nutjob. Whereas everyone was (and is) using MP3, to me, it just doesn’t feel right to use a lossy codec and I’m not happy if I cannot be sure that the rip from CD was bit accurate. I’ve been using lossless compression and ultra-slow, bit-accurate ripping software for years, so I thought I might write a bit about it

Ripping a CD

First, there’s the problem of getting the music from your CD to your hard drive. In the beginnings, I used CDex but I let myself be convinced that Exact Audio Copy is the better choice (there was take about some specific types of extraction errors CDex couldn’t detect).

Exact Audio Copy also integrates AccurateRip. This is a system that calculates checksums of any audio file you rip and stores them in an online database. The idea is simple: if your CD drive introduces errors into the data during extraction, these errors will be pretty much unique for every user (a scratch here, a fluctuation there…). But if your CD drive manages a perfectly accurate rip, you will end up with the exact same data, thus, the exact same checksum as everyone else in the world who has ripped that CD.

Of course you should use the EAC offset test CD and the AccurateRip offset validation options and find out exactly whether your drive is capable of doing C2 error detection (which to find out requires a scratched CD). You shouldn’t use anything above 4x read speed for ripping and set EAC to high quality error recovery. You can also configure EAC to rip every song twice. It will automatically tag a song a broken unless both rips are absolutely identical bit by bit which provides another level of security.

Ripping a whole CD at these settings takes at least 1 hour, but that’s a price I’m happily paying. In the end, you’ll only rip a CD once and listen to it many times!

Archiving Songs

To archive my music I use lossless compression. Storing plain WAVE (.wav) files would serve this purpose, but using a lossless compression format does save some disk space, adds checksums to the files, allows me to tag my music and provide replay gain per song and album. Replay gain calculates the overall loudness of an album, if your player supports it all albums will have the same average volume and you don’t need to adjust the volume when listening to different CDs.

There are various lossless formats available. Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio has a lossless compression variant and then there are many Open Source codecs, the most popular ones being Flac and WavPack. I chose Flac because has the best support (WinAmp has a built-in Flac decoder as do many other players, even some car stereos and mobile players support Flac).

As before, I don’t see any sense in going for anything but the best possible compression achievable, so if there’s an option in Flac that promises a 0.001% gain in compression ratio but makes the encoding take twice as long, of course I enable it :). So if you’re looking for the most insane combination of command line arguments for Flac, take this:

--verify --replay-gain --blocksize=4096 --mid-side --exhaustive-model-search --max-lpc-order=12 --qlp-coeff-precision-search --rice-partition-order=0,8 --apodization="bartlett" --apodization="bartlett_hann" --apodization="blackman" --apodization="blackman_harris_4term_92db" --apodization="connes" --apodization="flattop" --apodization="gauss(STDDEV)" --apodization="hamming" --apodization="hann" --apodization="kaiser_bessel" --apodization="nuttall" --apodization="rectangle" --apodization="triangle" --apodization="tukey(P)" --apodization="welch"

Always rip a whole CD first and then specify all the extracted .wav files at once so Flac knows which songs belong to an album. This allows Flac to calculate the overall album gain in addition to the replay gain per track.

Compressing a complete CD takes between 1 and 2 hours with these settings, but since this is something you only do once, well, why not!

Listening

Of course, after all this effort, you don’t want to listen to your music using your on-board sound card or other cheap listening equipment.

To my knowledge, the highest playback quality at the time can be achieved with Creative Labs’ X-Fi sound cards. You might want to try the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude, it uses the X-Fi chipset, but extends on the original design specifications and uses better parts to exceed the already great quality. Auzentech had previously created the Auzentech X-Meridian on its own, a now no longer produced audiophile quality sound card.

Regarding headphones, I can wholeheartedly recommend either the Grado RS1 (price tag about $700) or the Sennheiser HD650 (price tag about $500). Both are very comfortable, offer excellent production quality and, of course, deliver crystal clear sound on an audiophile level.

This is one of my favorite CDs of all time. Even though only an EP, “No Way Back” features two very, very intense tracks: “No Way Back” and “Close Your Eyes”.

While there is no doubt that this is a genuine Death Metal, “No Way Back” starts with a deeply touching and sad opening that slowly transforms into pure desperation. The song is driven by the unyielding pressure that is typical for Norther. Truly a masterpiece that tells a story with a lot of emotion.

“Close Your Eyes” carries the expression of frustration and disappointment while at same time, the lyrics express red-hot rage and anger. I guess Norther are just too good at this kind of stuff, because it holds you captive and doesn’t let you go until the story of this track is told.

I already loved “Norther” during the time of their first album “Dreams of Endless War”, when everyone was blaming them of ripping off “Children of Bodom” while I truly couldn’t see the slightest resemblance between their styles. After “Death Unlimited”, they headed off in a direction I initially couldn’t relate to, but their latest release is exactly what I’m longing for!

My personal list of must-hear tracks for Norther would be: Dreams of Endless War - Released, Dreams of Endless War - Nothing Left, Mirror of Madness - Betrayed, Mirror of Madness - Everything is an End, Death Unlimited - Deep Inside, Death Unlimited - A Fallen Star, Death Unlimited - Nothing, Solution 7 - YDKS (You Don’t Know Shit), Till Death Us Unites - Drowning, Till Death Us Unites - Everything, No Way Back - No Way Back, No Way Back - Close Your Eyes, N - We Rock

My personal rating for “No Way Back” is a definitive 10 out of 10.

Had the chance to listen to “Devian” today, a new death metal group with vocals by “Legion” (the voice we all know / knew “Marduk” by).

By their descriptions on Last.fm “…taking focus off the blastbeating using a wider palette of sounds from slow grinding gloom to exploding primal fury raising the standard of their body of work in a sharply tuned firewind or strong brutal songs…” and themselves “…DEVIAN decided to go for a more dynamic old school vibe, which is built upon a very catchy combination of melody and aggression.”

The opener “Serenade for the Fallen” was very atmospheric and touching, so I was expecting something great to come my way. But the remainder of the disc doesn’t have any dramaturgy whatsoever. Everything sounds like monotonous thrashing at pretty much the same intensity throughout the whole tracklist.

It’s analogous to someone shouting, all the time at the same pitch and volume, “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” - you don’t sense much emotion and after a few seconds it already feels weak, uninteresting and you’re wishing there was some buildup in tension or a melancholic part that explodes into hate allowing you to pick up the emotion. It would feel just that much more intense with some variance or melodic parts.

My personal rating for “Ninewinged Serpent” is maybe 2 out of 10. Without the great atmospheric opener, that would become a 1 out of 10.

Let me show you something:

These are the boxes of all the sound cards I’ve owned so far. Now what do you think I would answer if you asked me to recommend a sound card?

Anything not from Creative Labs would be my answer.

The reasons for that?

Well, let’s start by taking a look at some of this week’s topics in Creative Labs’ Vista forum:

• Thanks for everything folks, its time for me to go…
• Don’t put up with it, ask for a refund.
• How hard is it to code audio drivers? (Vista)
• Alternative Vista Sound Cards to the XFI
• Creative fails with Vista drivers.
• Why cant Creative provide….
• X-Fi on Vista is a joke, goodbye Creative!!!
• Packing my bags

So, what has happened?

Windows Vista features a completely rewritten audio kernel that provides better accuracy and improves sound quality, but ultimately cripples DirectSound 3D (more info) by seeing the sound card as a lightweight signal converter, making EAX and advanced hardware 3D audio nearly impossible.

You can’t blame Creative Labs for that. They are in fact providing hardware support by means of OpenAL (an alternative non-Microsoft audio library) and they’re working on a wrapper named ALchemy that redirects DirectSound to OpenAL, thereby reenabling EAX for Windows Vista games.

The problem with Creative Labs, plain and simple, is their drivers. All I’m asking for are drivers that:

• do not cause my ears to ring from the bad mixing quality
• do not produce crazy chirps and scratches
• do not make my Vista OS randomly BSOD twice a day

In more than one year of development time, Creative Labs has not managed to produce a proper Windows Vista driver for any of the sound cards. What little development happens seems to be directed towards the X-Fi series, Audigy owners are left out in the cold.

A statement made by a Creative Labs employee (see here) even suggests that their drivers were faulty all the time and Windows Vista’s increased demands merely exposed bugs that didn’t surface in Windows XP.

The latest driver available for my Audigy 2 has been released in March 2007. Creative Labs actually is in possession of slightly newer and better drivers, but does not release them, not even as beta drivers. One brave user has discovered the newer Audigy drivers hidden within the X-Fi drivers. He is providing them for download in his blog “No More Goat Soup“.

And that’s my rant about Creative Labs…

Finntroll has released a new album this month: Ur Jordens Djup.

It Rocks!!   Finntroll has created an absolute masterpiece with this album. I’ve been hearing Metal for more than a decade now and this is the by far greatest album I’ve listened to in years.

The first track, Sång, already begins with fantastic drive and in perfect harmony. This and every single track that follows is a masterpiece in itself. This is one mad album, incredibly well crafted and performed in perfection!