EAC fails to correctly detect the caching feature of one of my optical drives
I don't believe you. Please provide some evidence.
Thanks for the kind words I feel like I just asked for a rare steak at a vegan restaurant.
Here is a screenie of EAC having completed the set up wizard. As you can see it shows that the drive does not cache audio. However the drive does cache audio. I confirmed this by running 'cdparanoia -A' which is the analyse mode of cdparanoia. During this analysis the drive cache and timing behaviour are analysed. One can watch as the cache is detected, filled and as cdparanoia checks it can be flushed and defeated. I'll post that as well.
And here is the output of 'cdparanoia -A'
$ cdparanoia -A
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)
Using cdda library version: 10.2
Using paranoia library version: 10.2
Checking /dev/cdrom for cdrom...
Testing /dev/cdrom for SCSI/MMC interface
SG_IO device: /dev/sr0
CDROM model sensed sensed: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH15F EG00
Checking for SCSI emulation...
Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)
Checking for MMC style command set...
Drive is MMC style
DMA scatter/gather table entries: 1
table entry size: 131072 bytes
maximum theoretical transfer: 55 sectors
Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).
Verifying CDDA command set...
Expected command set reads OK.
Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
drive returned OK.
=================== Checking drive cache/timing behavior ===================
Seek/read timing:
[53:17.07]: 54ms seek, 0.33ms/sec read [40.6x]
[50:00.00]: 46ms seek, 0.35ms/sec read [38.2x]
[40:00.00]: 60ms seek, 0.38ms/sec read [35.0x]
[30:00.00]: 51ms seek, 0.42ms/sec read [31.9x]
[20:00.00]: 57ms seek, 0.48ms/sec read [27.8x]
[10:00.00]: 57ms seek, 0.57ms/sec read [23.2x]
[00:00.00]: 58ms seek, 0.74ms/sec read [18.0x]
Analyzing cache behavior...
Approximate random access cache size: 16 sector(s)
Drive cache tests as contiguous
Drive readahead past read cursor: 234 sector(s)
Cache tail cursor tied to read cursor
Cache tail granularity: 1 sector(s)
Cache read speed: 0.15ms/sector [86x]
Access speed after backseek: 0.71ms/sector [18x]
Backseek flushes the cache as expected
Drive tests OK with Paranoia.
Very few applications are perfect. Perhaps only the very simplest applications are entirely free of bugs. Manufacturers of optical drives are not always forthcoming about their products' cache behaviour and it's unreasonable to expect every application to be able to correctly detect every strategy. Personally I don't expect EAC or any other complex application to be 100% perfect and I'm not disappointed if it isn't. This is expressed more succinctly by the developers of cdparanoia http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/paranoia/2...une/001575.html > The reason for using EAC instead of cdparanoia has been that EAC has
> been able to handle drives with caches, while cdparanoia hasn't.
Well, it's more that EAC expects drives can have bigger/different
caches than older Paranoia did. A few more drives today also offer
command set ways to force media access, as opposed to attempting to
trick the drive into flushing cache via access patterns. But only a
few (and you can't rely on that).
Both EAC and Paranoia will still have the problem where a drive with a
completely different cache strategy can defeat them without either
knowing (thus bundling the new -A tests with cdparanoia that tries to
find these drives).