A few non-English users have been emailing me since version 1.02 of Pillage was released. They had issues with the checklist not seeing their “Pillage” playlist properly.

While trying to squash that bug, I encountered two troubling (but very fixable) problems with CDParanoia (the brains of Pillage).

Brief Backstory: I am ripping all of my CDs to a hard drive (2TB, all AIFF files). I have gotten through all the albums, and am now in CD Single land.

Ok, so the problems. CD Singles sometimes have “features” on them (Enhanced CD Singles, with a few wallpaper pictures, a poorly encoded video, and/or a buggy screen saver), and sometimes evil corporate labels decide to “Copy Control” their CDs. Both are bad tweaks of the CD format. “Enhanced CDs” and “Copy Control” CDs have two things in common: BOTH are ignored by CDParanoia. CDParanoia simply sees the discs are having a very long last audio track. The problem: that ain’t audio! What’s the second thing? Read the end of this post…

I have enabled a new feature in Pillage, which I have been using with MUCH success. If you check a box prior to clicking the “Rip The CD” button, you can basically tell CDParanoia to stop ripping the last “audio” track just before it will hit data. Seems easy, but there’s a LOT of math involved to make sure you don’t actually stop your rip early, and miss a note or two of music that you do want.

It’s a killer feature, and I am doing some last minute checks before I put the new Pillage out into the wild. Stay tuned!

Oh…and don’t even get me started on how evil “Copy Control” CDs are! Grrrr! I’m being polite even referring to them as “CDs”, since legally they can not even carry the “Compact Disc” logo. Don’t believe me? Check any “Copy Controlled” disc you own. You will not find the “Compact Disc” logo on it, since the copy control completely corrupts the format. The interesting thing is that a “Copy Controlled” disc is essentially an “Enhanced CD”, but with a few slight tweaks to make it more problematic in computer CD drives.

THIS is why people download! Honest people, who buy CDs, and who have a legal right to back their discs up onto another medium, have to jump through all sorts of bullshit hoops just to get the data that they legally bought!!! ARGH!

Ooops. Sorry. Started to get off on a rant there. I’ll save that one for later…

Pillage. The new version, coming VERY soon…