Ripping off recordings DIGITAL AUDIO EXTRACTION DO'S, DON'TS AND DO'ERS - Statistical Data Included

Emedia Professional, July, 1999 by Robert A. Starrett

The UltraPlex Wide ships with Plextor Manager software, currently in version 1.73. This utility pops up with four tabs--Drive control, Disc Info, Audio Control, and A/V Player. The Drive Control lists the host adapter number, the SCSI ID, the firmware revision, and the buffer size of the selected drive. It allows you to change the drive speed, set the spin-down time, enable/disable Plextor's AudioFS conversion tool, and lock and unlock the drive tray. Disc Info shows you the type of disc, number of tracks, number of sessions, and the disc label. From there, you can call DiscDupe, the Plextor disc copy utility, assuming that you have a Plextor recorder. Audio Control lets you set the volume and balance for audio discs, switch the left and right channels, and reset the drive. The A/V Player will play audio, WAV files, AVI files, and MPEG files.

Two other features of the Plextor Manager are notable. The Audio Capture feature is simple and fast. The Audio capture screen lets you choose the track number to extract, the sampling rata, and the channel setup. Choosing Capture lets you choose the destination directory and begin the extraction. This program is simple and easy to use, but the best thing about it is the speed. Extracting a four-minute, 30-second track took 13 seconds! That is a 24X extraction, as advertised, and the file was perfectly clean. You can see why people swear by Plextor drives for Digital Audio Extraction.

The other feature is AudioFS, which makes .cda (Compact Disc Audio) tracks on a CD look like WAV files. This feature is especially useful if you are compressing to MP3. Instead of having to extract WAVs to the hard drive--using up 40 to 50MB of disk space per file--you can use the simulated WAV on the CD audio disc as a source and compress it directly to MP3. And since the files look like WAVs to Windows, you can play them through the SCSI bus, without a physical cable connection to your sound card. This is a very handy feature for external SCSI drives. (For those of you who don't have a Plextor drive and thus no access to this conversion tool, try the alternate CDFS.VXD mentioned in the sidebar "Breaking the WAVs: CDFS.VXD." It does not work with all drives, but if it works with yours, you can have this handy feature, too.)

For companies using audio extraction as an integral part of a custom audio disc production system, Plextor has combined these elements and more in a turnkey solution. Incorporating automated extraction and recording software in an integrated network, the key selling point of the system remains the extraction-optimized Plextor drives found in the MegaPlex towers from which the stored audio tracks are drawn after the customer selects them. The system provides a sound model for how digital audio extraction can play a key role in aggressive new technology-based business models.

RELATED ARTICLE: breaking the WAVs: CDFS.VXD

If your plans are to create MP3 files or other compressed audio formats, creating a WAV file on hard disk first, and then compressing it into the secondary format, is a waste of time and disk space. There is a handy solution that bypasses the creation of a WAV altogether. CDFS.VXD is a freeware device driver that replaces the Microsoft CDFS.VXD (Compact Disc File System) in the subdirectory c:\windows\system\iosubsys.