Hello all,

After a long while of researching, designing & editing I have a finished version of my Plextools guide. It's aimed to be a fast, high quality audio ripping guide & it's main purpose is to show users the best way to set-up Plextools to detect errors & recovery them as efficiently as possible it also explains freedb, file name options & eventually I will add compression as well making it a complete ripping guide. I still would like any input no matter how simple, I will consider adding all user input that can make the guide easier to read & more accurate so please post any comments, suggestions here or e-mail me at

Martin_Chiriano@hotmail.com

The site can be found here.

One thing I was not able to find on the Plextor home page or Plextools home page is detailed information on supported drives, I know this information was available at one time & I would appreciate anyone who can provide it for me.

Uaaaaa, my eyes, they hurt! Damn people, where do you get all that crack from? I bet bryant hooked you up...

Seriously though, the colors are a bit unpleasant, something more easy on the eyes would be welcome.
And the page doesn't load in IE with enabled pop-up blocker, but that's geocities related I guess.

The site contains minor javascript but should be viewable even if its blocked.

Doesn't open at all here with Firefox.

I can confirm that with popupblocker enabled (javascript enabled too).

Also won't open in Firefox 1.0 with popup blocker and Javascript enabled.

Ahh. pop-up heaven...
Seriously would you consider adding this to the HA wiki?

confirmed not open with firefox 1.0 win32 with pop ups blocked

Hey, great guide! Thanks for putting it together Westgroveg. I just started working on a computer with a Plextor drive, and this guide is exactly what I needed to start ripping some "distressed" CD's.

Question: does Plextools have a "spin down after X minutes of extracting" feature, so that the drive doesn't end up working for 8 hours and burning out? Or is that something I shouldn't worry about?

Added the site to a new location which is pop-up free here, it is also viewable here thanks to Liekloo.



Thanks, gald to see people are finding it useful.


A timed spin down feature has not been programmed into PlexTools yet but PlexTools does much less re-reading than EAC so it is much healther for your drive in most situations to use PlexTools instead of EAC. Another thing that may stress your drive is SpeedRead CD/DVD which boosts your drives speed, it is not enabled by default & can be found in the advanced properties tab of the the drive settings screen.

(PlexTools help)

Plextools Pro has the option to autosave the log files marking the option "Log errors".

Also, note that %Y does not work when retrieving information from freedb.

Do you mean ticking the Error Log check box?

I guess that's a PlexTools bug, people will have to manually input that info or use a different scheme until it's fixed.


I really like the color scheme considering it's just the links that can be slightly difficult to read (on some video cards, I have tested) I didn't think it would be a big problem. Later on I will add a javascript program that allows people to change the color scheme of the site, a reverse type.

After getting many comments about the site’s color scheme concerning readability I decided to converted the whole site to black text on white background. It was a rather big change so I thought I would announce it.

Congratulations on your project, westgroveg! An impressive guide. I wonder how long it took you to put together.

Thanks, it’s been a pet project for quite a few months now, the reason it took me so long to get it finished is because I have school duties & more so because there are so many ripping guides out there that if I created one I wanted to make sure I provided exactly the right information for my target audience; music fans looking for a standard way to build a fast, high quality digital music collection, with CD-TEXT information & good documentation about the DAE process of each CD.

I also would like to add a compression section, actually I have began this part of the guide already but school starts in a few days so it will be quite awhile until I finish it.