Apparently Wine is nearing that so elusive 1.0 release, which really annoys me considering my recent Wine experiences.
Wherever possible, I try to use a native Linux application, and even in the specialised field of pro audio, this is often possible. I use Ardour as my main DAW, Rosegarden for MIDI sequencing and JAMin for mastering. But there’s one program for which there simply isn’t a suitable open source replacement: Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Now before we go down the road of: “WTF are you talking about you jackass, there are loads of native Linux CD rippers”, and “How can one ripper be better than another, when it’s all digital anyway?”, please accept the following facts:
- EAC is better (see here for a plan English explanation)
- CDDA Paranoia and Rubyripper are not usable for proper secure ripping (See comments below)
- This article is not meant to be about the science of ripping audio CDs, but the ability to run EAC under Wine
- I am always right
Exact Audio Copy Running Under Ubuntu 7.10 (Wine 0.9.46)
I was an EAC user under Windows for some years, and so was pleased to see it was nicely supported under Wine when I switched full time to Linux. Had it not been supported, I don’t think I could have completely switched. However laziness and apathy got the better of me and it wasn’t until the beginning of this year that I finally decided to take on the gargantuan task of securely ripping, converting to FLAC and comprehensively tagging my entire music collection (which is about 96% CD, 1% Vinyl and 3% SACD & DVD-Audio). At The time I was using Ubuntu 7.10, and I duly installed Wine 0.9.46 and the latest copy of EAC, and got to work.
It wasn’t until my switch from Ubuntu to Fedora when the troubles began. Fedora is kept fully up to date during each version’s life cycle (unlike Ubuntu which only receives security updates) and the current version of Wine in Fedora 8 is 0.9.56. Unfortunately, EAC does not work with Wine 0.9.56. It crashes consistently when accessing the CD drive. I have also tried Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9, both of which have Wine 0.9.58 and the bug remains. Therefore I can deduce that somewhere between Wine 0.9.46 and 0.9.56, one or more things changed in the Wine code to completely screw EAC.
Regression is never a good thing in software, in fact it’s unacceptable. It’s even more unacceptable when the Wine project claims to be on course for a 1.0 release in June and entering a period of stabilisation. The wine release schedule is currently as follows:
- 0.9.59 – 4 April 2008
- 0.9.60 – 18 April 2008
- 0.9.61 (1.0.0rc1) – 2 May 2008
- 0.9.62 (1.0.0rc2) – 16 May 2008
- 0.9.63 (1.0.0rc3) / 1.0.0? – 30 May 2008
- 1.0.0 – 13 June 2008
I don’t know if EAC will work again with Wine by version 1.0.0, somehow I doubt it. And yes I have reported this bug, and no this is not the only software to have become less compatible with Wine recently, and yes I realise this article doesn’t really have much of a constructive point (except to warn people that EAC does not work with later versions of Wine) but it’s rather disheartening to have to run Ubuntu 7.04 just to use EAC under Wine when the point of new software releases is to improve the application, not reverse any good work it’s already done.
So that’s why I’m annoyed at the Wine project and will not be sending them a Christmas card this year.
Posted by Dan Kegel on April 4, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Can you show a link to the bug? I can’t find it.
I filed two bugs of my own about this just now,
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12359 and
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12361
Posted by lithax on April 4, 2008 at 9:09 pm
I can’t find my bug reports either now :p , I’ll file a new bug report along with some output.
Posted by Hi on April 15, 2008 at 9:04 pm
You don’t need to revert to 7.04 to use a previous version of wine. I believe there are ways to install older wine versions. One is to download the older package to install. Not sure if you have to -purge the installed version or simply uninstall it.
I don’t like regressions either, but many times a new Wine version will see regressions fixed if bug reports have been submitted.
P.S. Not too sure about procedures but I know it can be done.
GL.
Posted by lithax on April 16, 2008 at 10:07 am
I have to admit I always thought Wine was one of those applications that was a complete nightmare to compile, but after doing regression tests I’ve found compiling Wine is actually not that bad. Once Fedora 9 is released I’ll be able to use that with an older version of Wine.
Posted by concerned on May 3, 2008 at 2:37 pm
You realize that you can downgrade a version of wine in ubuntu right? I had no problem running eac in any of the versions of wine that you had mentioned. Wine is not for the faint of heart, it is extremely hard to set stuff up in it correctly. People file bugs/complain all of the time that stuff doesnt work when all they really need to do is look at the error log, figure out what dll, ocs, etc it is missing, and add that. none too hard. I suggest upgrading to the newest ubuntu and then downgrade wine if need be. Also, it ruined your life?!?! A fairly pathetic life I must say.
To be serious though, there is an eac clone for linux (produces the same logs and uses the same ripping processes), i just do not know what it is called and cannot be arsed to look for them.
Posted by lithax on May 3, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I’m only using Ubuntu currently, while I wait for Fedora 9 to be released, so I haven’t greatly investigated downgrading packages.
I appreciate Wine is hard to setup, had EAC not worked well on any Wine I would have accepted that. What annoyed me was that EAC, which had been working through quite a few versions of Wine for about 18 months (across both Ubuntu and Fedora) suddenly stopped working after an upgrade.
The EAC clone you refer to is cdparanoia and/or RubyRipper. There’s two basic problems with those systems:
Incidentally, my life is largely spread between fiddling inside old & new studio equipment and tweaking realtime performance on Linux workstations with little human interaction. So yes, my life is fairly pathetic
They do no empty the CD-ROM cache, so if your optical drive caches audio, your error correction won’t be accurate
There is no system that currently works with AccurateRip. And AccurateRip is a great little insurance system to verify that the CD rip is indeed accurate
In any event, my investigations into this have shown that it’s as much a kernel problem as anything else. And no, it’s not “that kernel problem” that’s cropped up with Wine and Ubuntu Hardy (I get that too, but there’s another issue that affects EAC).
In any event, this is all academic at the moment as my optical drive packed up last week and now there’s some sort of major power problem with my laptop and it’s currently in the hands of a trained money at Toshiba.
Thanks for the comments BTW.
Posted by logos34 on May 6, 2008 at 12:54 am
I’m struggling with EAC on Ubuntu Hardy too. But the guy above is right about past versions–you don’t have to reinstall. I was able to install older releases as far back as the .46 for Feisty.
I finally got the latest Wine release (.61) to work by CAREFULLY going through winecfg Drive tab. On mine it refuses to autodetect the partitions/devices correctly and includes duplicate entries, which I have to clean up. Here’s what I have to do:
-press ‘Autodetect…’ button
-go through the list manually clicking on each and every partition/device, with ‘Type’ dropdown menu set to ‘Autodetect’. It turns out that on mine the cdrom drive was being misidentified as a ‘local hard disk’ partition. So I added it as D:\ and set type to CDROM.
-launch EAC and set EAC options>interface tab to “Native Win32 interface for NT/2000/XP. Relaunch. Only then does EAC see the drive and fetch cddb info for audio CD.
The problem is that it does not always save the settings over standby or system restart. So I have to reconfigure all over again!
Posted by logos34 on May 8, 2008 at 8:40 am
Solved the problem by going back to wine v.47 (for gutsy). Now it detects the cdrom correctly after restart or resume.
Yet another case of the devs *improving* a pkg to the point it no longer works properly!
Posted by barry on May 9, 2008 at 1:09 am
Just upgraded to Hardy Heron and EAC crashes when i hit the MP3 button.
Fixed this not by changing Wine. Just followed logos34’s tip to “launch EAC and set EAC options>interface tab to “Native Win32 interface for NT/2000/XP. Relaunch.”
Now it works fine – although EAC now only sees my first CD/DVD Drive.
Thanks! Happy to have a easy solution to this.
Posted by geo on June 5, 2008 at 11:52 am
just a quick note, the cache found on some cd drives
can be detected by timing sucessive reads (given an unloaded test system)
the cache can then be defeated by either using the FUA
(force unit access flag) on supporting drives, or by overreading the cache.
if i remember correctly, ruby ripper is designed to overread
the cache. in that sense, ruby ripper at least is good for
accurate rips. it probably uses an arbitrarily large target
buffer size rather than detecting the cache.
the problem is, non of the developers of low level cd rippers on linux seem interested in the kind of pedantic detail provided by EAC. IOW, accurate rip support, proper log files, and C2 error support seem to be outside the scope of the application as it is designed.
there exists an open source linux accurate rip checker
called ARCue.pl and that seems to indicate that the spoon
(accurate rip creator) is open to open source apps using
the db, and that it’s trivially easy to do. it’s not suitable for
most people though as it currently only works on images,
not tracks.
i may submit some changes to it at some point but i’m seriously looking at modifying one of the existing linux
C/C++ tools to provide a ripper comparible to EAC. (GUI included)
don’t watch this space though