Old 11-28-2012, 11:42 AM   #321
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Bigopigo,

I sent you a pm.

Please try the following.

Install the current 32 bit version of Reaper. Place the dll that I sent you in the Reaper plugins directory. e.g.

C:\Program Files (x86)\REAPER\Plugins

rename the old one e.g. reaper_ddp.dll to reaper_ddp.dll.old, or just over write it. Restart Reaper, open you project, then re-render the ddp, and retest. Let me know what happens
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Old 11-28-2012, 12:38 PM   #322
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Default DDP ok.

Wyatt:

Just did what you sugested. It worked. Thank you very, very much.
Also sent you a pm before trying that explaining that i tryed with a v3.61 dll but it didnt work.

Also sent you my .rpp

Dont have a clue to what happened to the pm...

Until it gets solved out i have to render the ddps on the 32bit version.

Thanks again for you help.

Last edited by Bigopigo; 11-28-2012 at 12:47 PM. Reason: Correcting name
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Old 11-28-2012, 01:01 PM   #323
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigopigo View Post
Wyatt:

Just did what you sugested. It worked. Thank you very, very much.
Also sent you a pm before trying that explaining that i tryed with a v3.61 dll but it didnt work.

Also sent you my .rpp

Dont have a clue to what happened to the pm...

Until it gets solved out i have to render the ddps on the 32bit version.

Thanks again for you help.
Glad you was able to get it to work. I did get your RPP file, and I didn't see anything wrong with it. This makes me think that Reapers current ddp plug-in has some rounding issues. I really don't know.
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Old 11-28-2012, 01:14 PM   #324
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Exactly what i thought.

The cd i dpp rendered 2 weeks ago had the track names in the cue wav. This one doesnt. Is it because of the version?
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Old 11-28-2012, 01:19 PM   #325
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Oops. My mistake. The names are dark red and i didnt seem them.
All ok.

Thx again.
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Old 11-28-2012, 01:57 PM   #326
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Here's one more thing I just found out while doing some ddp test on Bigopigo's project.

If you make a time selection from the start of the project to the end of the last marker, then choose render bounds "time selection"
Then, ddpinfo tool doesn't have the error.

Bigopigo,
Try this
Go back to your original project that's on Reaper 4.31 64bit version. Make a time selection from the absolute beginning to the last @ marker. Then when rendering DDP, choose time selection.



When I test this way, there was no errors. Can you confirm this as well?
Thanks, Wyatt
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Old 11-28-2012, 02:07 PM   #327
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You are CORRECT.

Man... Just had to time select...


Waves seem the same but dat diferent sizes:

286797 (32bit and no time selection)
286650 (64bit with time selection)

Thank you again.

Last edited by Bigopigo; 11-28-2012 at 02:11 PM. Reason: Completing info.
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Old 11-28-2012, 03:20 PM   #328
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigopigo View Post
You are CORRECT.

Man... Just had to time select...


Waves seem the same but dat diferent sizes:

286797 (32bit and no time selection)
286650 (64bit with time selection)

Thank you again.
Your welcome, glad you got it going.

I would stick with original one you had on 64bit Reaper, because the PQ Text on that test one (32bit) I sent has weird characters.

I think whats happening is that Reaper is wanting to see the end of the last item on a cd frame.

I did another test on Reaper 4.31, and this time I dragged out the last media item until it snapped (on the @ marker) then rendered without the time selection, and everything was ok.
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Old 11-28-2012, 03:33 PM   #329
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I had already send The 32bit when you got it solved out. But i Burned with your tool and it was OK.
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Old 11-28-2012, 03:50 PM   #330
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigopigo View Post
I had already send The 32bit when you got it solved out. But i Burned with your tool and it was OK.
Was the cd text ok, or are you using cd text on the pressings?
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Old 11-29-2012, 02:37 AM   #331
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I had to remove/substitute portuguese characters like é ã ç. Even with the LANGUAGE=Portuguese my cd player in the car would mess the text up. Nothing we're not already use to.
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Old 11-29-2012, 03:10 PM   #332
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While reading the discussion about how to get Reaper to produce a DDP with a data file of correct length, I must admit that I'm glad I built in so many error checks into ddpinfo. And I'm glad to hear that a disc manufacturer really rejected such a broken DDP even if it's only a difference of one CD frame. Of course it would not be terribly difficult to write some code to deal with this type of error, and believe me, I've been thinking of adding this to ddpinfo. But then what would it help, if my program can deal with such a DDP? Another program might still give you an error, or - much worse - no error but a failed pressing.

There are basically four(!) spots inside a DDP, where the length of the program can be read. They really should all match.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigopigo View Post
I had to remove/substitute Portuguese characters like é ã ç. Even with the LANGUAGE=Portuguese my cd player in the car would mess the text up. Nothing we're not already use to.
Just a few comments on CD Text:

First, the language set in CD Text is only informative, it can be used by the player to give you the choice of which language to choose, when you offer track titles in multiple languages. Now most mastering software does not offer you to enter more then one set of track/disc titles etc., so your user's will not have a choice. Also I don't know that there are many players which would read more than one language at all. So, I'm daring to say, that it's pretty much completely irrelevant, which language you set. Which is probably the reason most mastering software doesn't give you that choice anyway.

(There is one small but very important caveat here: in CD Text you can also set the language to unknown, which some mastering software did. A few years back one big software provider for pressing plants ("Eclipse Data Technologies") apparently changed there rules to disallow unknown language here, which some CD players are reported to have trouble with. So, I'd go with English as default.)


Second, and that's what you're after with your Portuguese characters: there is the character set you can set for CD text. The choice for western languages is extremely limited, you have either ISO 646 (aka ASCII) or ISO 8859-1 (aka Latin1). Given that the second is a superset of the first, there is absolutely no reason to use anything other than "Latin1". So again, most mastering software does not offer a choice here. If you want to know, which characters are allowed for CD text, lookup ISO 8859-1 at Wikipedia, it does not include all Portuguese characters I believe.

Now Reaper internally uses a system called Unicode, which can - given that you have a font for it on your computer - display any character from any languages known to mankind. If reaper had a dedicated CD text editor, it should thus limit the possible characters to what Latin1 has (and maybe offer a few Asian character sets from the CD Text repertoire). Now, because Reaper does not have such an editor, and the DDP export uses a somewhat cryptic workaround, it should probably check for characters outside the Latin1 range and give an error, so you can modify your title. Or it could silently convert any character to one from within the Latin1 range (this is usually known as transliteration). Earlier versions of Reaper unfortunately did neither and just wrote the CD text fields in one of the Unicode encodings to the DDP. This would produce garbage on the CD for any character outside of the ACSII range, so you as a user had to make sure, you'd stick with good old plain ASCII. If I understand Wyatt correctly, the newest version of Reaper now transliterates anything outside the ASCII range to ASCII. I my personal opinion, that's not ideal, as explained above. So I'm afraid, you're still not able to use your Portuguese characters.

2013-01-10 Edit: I'm sorry to have been unprecise in the last paragraph, I've tested CD text export in v4.31/x64 with the following result: Reaper does handle characters from the Latin1 repertoire correctly, so Ä and é the like will show up correctly on the pressed CD. For characters which are outside the Latin1 repertoire a simple space is inserted silently.

Last comment: how your non-ASCII characters are shown on a CD player may vary of course. I've usually found that French accents are supported, but if your car stereo has only capital letters--as mine has--it still looks a bit funny.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope it gives some background information on the CD Text issues, most of use are dealing with once in a while.

anrug

Last edited by anrug; 01-10-2013 at 03:30 PM.
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Old 11-30-2012, 12:50 PM   #333
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Andreas:

Thanks for taking the time to explain the details of the tecnhology.
Thank you also for writing this great tool that saves us money and time.
Together with Wyatts gui they make my life a lot easier. Between rendering, confirming and sending i save a lot with your tools.

Cheers!
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Old 12-08-2012, 08:12 AM   #334
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quick question:

the ddp helpt tells me i should use 44.1/16 (sure that) otherwise it would be cancelled. however i can keep the SR at 96000 and still the export works and let's me burn a CD from e.g. wave editor... how is that possible?

question:

- which SRC is the export applying when i do not choose the correct target SR in the "options"?
- is dither and noise shaping generally unvailable for DDP export? (it's being greyed out once i switch to DDP, however the checkmarks will remain based on my previous settings)

i did a search for 30 mins but did not find helpful hints... sorry in case this is redundant q.

thanks,
tim
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Old 12-08-2012, 05:36 PM   #335
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anrug, profuse thanks for post #332 above. It includes a synthesis of information the likes of which one might never find by googling.
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Old 12-17-2012, 01:11 PM   #336
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Default Reaper DDP not accepted

hello,

unfortunately i got a reaper DDP back from the plant with errors in the CDTEXT.bin file (they used Eclipse Data Analysis). for those who feel inclined pls. have a look at the error report. i also attached the original zipped CDTEXT.bin for debugging. you can see the above mentioned "language" issue to show up as "warning", but there is other "errors"

funny thing: i checked the stuff on a PC with Sonoris DDP Creator Pro - all it said was "Passed - OK"....

upload also was accurate - MD5 checksums were successfully validated for each and every file.

what i did was opening the DDP fileset in sonoris - not touching anything, but rewriting the metadata files - and all was well....

thanks for insights/tips....

tim
Attached Images
File Type: jpg Eclipse_Errorlog.jpg (64.9 KB, 548 views)
Attached Files
File Type: zip CDTEXT.zip (566 Bytes, 301 views)

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Old 12-27-2012, 08:21 AM   #337
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Quote:
Originally Posted by groovenagl View Post
hello,

unfortunately i got a reaper DDP back from the plant with errors in the CDTEXT.bin file (they used Eclipse Data Analysis). for those who feel inclined pls. have a look at the error report. i also attached the original zipped CDTEXT.bin for debugging. you can see the above mentioned "language" issue to show up as "warning", but there is other "errors"
I've finally found some time to open up your CD text file in a hex editor. I can confirm that the language is not set (Eclipse doesn't like that) and that the internal structure of the file is not completely correct. Unfortunately the Eclipse error messages you posted are chopped off, so I can't look into all of them. Also I don't understand which ones are just warnings and which ones are responsible for Eclipse rejecting the master altogether.

Quote:
funny thing: i checked the stuff on a PC with Sonoris DDP Creator Pro - all it said was "Passed - OK"....
Well, Sonoris was built to open DDPs, not being pedantic about checking their format (which is generally much more difficult than just getting the information you're after). Users just don't like seeing error messages, which they can't do anything about and which they might not see in other software.

That's a general characteristic of most software. E.g. when opening wave files, DAWs try to be as resilient to incorrect file formats as possible. The drawback of this kind of fault-tolerant behaviour is that broken files will not be detected and spread out further - but that's rather a philosophical topic.

Quote:
what i did was opening the DDP fileset in sonoris - not touching anything, but rewriting the metadata files - and all was well....
This makes total sense. Think of parsing a specific file format as getting a letter out of an envelope. You throw the enveope away, once you've got the letter. Then when forwarding the letter, you may use/built a new envelope.

The stuff Eclipse is complaining about is within this "envelope" domain. If Eclipse wanted they could fix it themselves, but that's of course not desired. The very point of DDP is, that after you, the mastering engineer, nobody messes around with it any more, not even tries to fix things.


Summary: it looks like Reaper's CD text in DDP export is buggy, and you should file a bug.

P.S.: Eclipse also mentions that you have audio within the first pre-gap (2 seconds usually). Is that true? You should definitely avoid that, because that's against the Red Book as far as I know. (Side note: of course it would be nice if Reaper would itself make sure, it's exports are up to Red Book standards.)
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Old 12-27-2012, 09:45 AM   #338
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Quote:
Originally Posted by anrug View Post
I've finally found some time to open up your CD text file in a hex editor. I can confirm that the language is not set (Eclipse doesn't like that) and that the internal structure of the file is not completely correct. Unfortunately the Eclipse error messages you posted are chopped off, so I can't look into all of them. Also I don't understand which ones are just warnings and which ones are responsible for Eclipse rejecting the master altogether.
hi andreas,

thanks for taking the time to look into the issue... the chopped off error report was the only thing i got back from my non-favorite plant HOFA - and even for that i had to jump through hoops... however, entries marked with [e] indicate critical errors; others are "i" for information, "w" for warning; "f" is file/format related. i found out that the version which they have in use is outdated since eclipse (i found that in their release notes) made the language warning an error in their latest updates...

Quote:
(...) The drawback of this kind of fault-tolerant behaviour is that broken files will not be detected and spread out further - but that's rather a philosophical topic.
well, just for the record: also DDPinfo did not show any error.

Quote:
P.S.: Eclipse also mentions that you have audio within the first pre-gap (2 seconds usually). Is that true? You should definitely avoid that, because that's against the Red Book as far as I know. (Side note: of course it would be nice if Reaper would itself make sure, it's exports are up to Red Book standards.)
the reaper file is spot on. no audio prior to 2.00sec, each region and marker sit/snapped perfectly on CD frames (240bpm; 1/75 grid). i attached a screenshot. maybe i'd need to make sure to have the region start a frame later?

thanks again, i'll file an error then. i hope this is going to be resolved soon - otherwise the whole DDP export is useless....

thanks and regards,
tim
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Old 12-27-2012, 04:11 PM   #339
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Quote:
Originally Posted by groovenagl View Post
thanks for taking the time to look into the issue... the chopped off error report was the only thing i got back from my non-favorite plant HOFA - and even for that i had to jump through hoops... however, entries marked with [e] indicate critical errors; others are "i" for information, "w" for warning; "f" is file/format related.
So the only critical problem with your CDTEXT.BIN is that there are 18 bytes written at the end of the file, which simply shouldn't be there.

Quote:
i found out that the version which they have in use is outdated since eclipse (i found that in their release notes) made the language warning an error in their latest updates...
Yeah, they indeed changed their software to require the language code set. Every mastering software had to adjust - that's real power.

Quote:
well, just for the record: also DDPinfo did not show any error.
Absolutely! I'm sorry if I made you think it could detect problems in the internal structure of the CD text file.

DDPinfo is not designed to check DDPs, it's designed to display it's content. Checking DDPs is very difficult, and the only product I've heard about which does that is Eclipse and of course DCA's Viper series of tools. Both offerings target optical manufacturers rather than mastering studios.

That being said, I have certainly contemplated adding all sorts of tests to DDPinfo, but that's *a lot* of work and very difficult to test (I'd have to create tons of broken DDPs for that). DDP is a format which gives a lot of freedom in how a CD can be described, being prepared for all these "flavors" is a massive task. I've not tested it, but I'm pretty positive I can build completely correct DDP images, which all the big mastering tools like Sequoia, Pyramix (i.e. Gear), SADiE, SoundBlade and CD Creator will refuse to open. They all stick to one specific flavor, probably because that's what good old Sonic Solution used.

Maybe I'll add some tests for the CD text file, but don't wait for that.

Side note: part of my ddptools is "cue2ddp", which reads cue sheets and creates DDPs from it. This software has very strict error handling, it will refuse to create the DDP if anything dubious or ambiguous is found in the cue sheet. It can be used as an error checker for cue sheets. DDPinfo does not do anything similar when reading DDPs.

Quote:
the reaper file is spot on. no audio prior to 2.00sec, each region and marker sit/snapped perfectly on CD frames (240bpm; 1/75 grid). i attached a screenshot. maybe i'd need to make sure to have the region start a frame later?
OK, I maybe wrong. I was just surprised by the strange start of Eclipse' PQ listing. That said, I think not starting directly on the track marker is usually a good idea, as CD players usually mute for a couple of frames at the start of a track, while the disc is starting to adjust it's speed. In different mastering houses I've seen minimum track start offsets between 4 CD frames ( ca 50 ms) and more than 100 ms. SACD requires at least 50 ms if I recall correctly.
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Old 01-10-2013, 03:46 PM   #340
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Having finally tested DDP export on Reaper v4.31/x64 I'd like to add to comments to our discussion here.

We've been discussing the CD Text language and it may be worth pointing out, that this is a field you the user should always set. This is done in the CD end marker, the one staring with '@', with a simple 'LANGUAGE=English'.

Also I'd like to report that Latin1 (ISO 8859-1) characters are handled correctly by Reaper and will make it into the DDP and to the pressed disc. If you enter non-Latin1 characters as track title--which nobody can prevent you from--Reaper will silently convert them to a simple space when writing the DDP. (I've corrected my earlier post, so as to not post misleading assumptions here.)

Finally I can confirm that Reaper produces DDP file sets with a broken CD Text file in v4.31/x64, so until that is fixed, I'd say stay away from CD text in tDDP export.

Edit: sorry, that was incorrect, I should have said: stay away from CD Text in DDP export until it's fixed.

Best
anrug

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Old 01-11-2013, 01:45 AM   #341
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hi andreas,

thanks for your all your efforts. i'm glad ollie has changed the status back to "confirmed" and the bug is going to be fixed. in terms of "staying away" from DDP this would be a dealbreaker for any serious user of reaper for audio production - i'd say just stay away from CD text - as long as this file is not produced and made part of the fileset the DDP should pass the DDP check.

in terms of characters replaced with whitespaces this might rather be a "live with it" option for the time being as long as you stick to the rule.

tim
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Old 01-11-2013, 06:54 AM   #342
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Quote:
Originally Posted by groovenagl View Post
thanks for your all your efforts. i'm glad ollie has changed the status back to "confirmed" and the bug is going to be fixed. in terms of "staying away" from DDP this would be a dealbreaker for any serious user of reaper for audio production - i'd say just stay away from CD text - as long as this file is not produced and made part of the fileset the DDP should pass the DDP check.
You're right and I was wrong. I've corrected my recommendation above. I wasn't aware Reaper could produce DDPs without CD text - my fault, sorry.

Quote:
in terms of characters replaced with whitespaces this might rather be a "live with it" option for the time being as long as you stick to the rule.
Agreed. I personally would prefer a warning, because it's difficult to remember, which characters are part of the Latin1 repertoire, but that's indeed a minor issue, there are certainly more important things to be improved in Reaper.
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Old 01-11-2013, 08:05 AM   #343
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Hi Andreas
I don't get it all
You mean cd text is broken since v4.31 and was good on older versions (4.30)?
I have already sent 2 ddps (with cd text) to the plant made with 4.31 and had no complaints about it (I'm on win xp 32bits).
Maybe I'll have to ask the clients for a cd, in order to check cd text...
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Old 01-11-2013, 09:10 AM   #344
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There is still a bug that on some renders, a CD frame is off or something else is wrong.
Here's a link to a test Reaper project file.
https://stash.reaper.fm/15048/DDPReaperTest.RPP

To Test
Open the RPP file (ignore the missing wav files)
Render to DDP
When I test with ddpinfo (converting to cue/wav), I get an error.
Error: data stream length (30069 sectors) does not match subcode (30070 sectors)

Prior to Reaper 4.25 (4.22) The error doesn't happen.
See This post. http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.p...57#post1069657
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Old 01-11-2013, 11:18 AM   #345
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Quite long ago, I have provided a function to convert Latin-2 and many Unicode chars to the most similar Latin-1 characters (like Č -> C, Ö -> O), which are supported by CD-TEXT. However, it seems this function haven't been used yet, as Reaper is replacing them with blanks.

Otherwise, I haven't changed anything for more than half a year now. So if something is broken now, I probably don't have anything to do with.
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Old 01-11-2013, 11:28 AM   #346
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Is it possible to get the detailed information what is broken now with CD-TEXT? Possibly an example of cdtext file? Or even better: could you give an example RPP file, with removed FX and without any media files (I can use empty audio clips to simulate), so I can debug what is happening.

Also, if you import back rendered DDP file set, is it loaded correctly?
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Old 01-11-2013, 12:32 PM   #347
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Hi Sergej,
Welcome back!
Cockos has changed something, and not you. Their change happened after Reaper 4.22
I really don't know about the CD Text issue because all my test were English only.

Something has changed on the render with it sometimes being 1 cd frame off, when being tested with Andrea's ddpinfo tool.

It would be nice if we could hear something from Cockos regarding these issues.
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Old 01-11-2013, 02:57 PM   #348
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Wyatt
Does the one cd frame off occur when rendering "time selection"?
I always render DDP as time selection as I've noticed it's the only way to get exactly the duration you want for the cd.
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Old 01-11-2013, 03:12 PM   #349
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vinx View Post
Wyatt
Does the one cd frame off occur when rendering "time selection"?
I always render DDP as time selection as I've noticed it's the only way to get exactly the duration you want for the cd.
Hi Vinx,
I have did test to where the time selection did work, but on my latest test, it didn't. It's seems like it's random.
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Old 01-11-2013, 03:57 PM   #350
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Quote:
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Hi Andreas
I don't get it all
You mean cd text is broken since v4.31 and was good on older versions (4.30)?
I can't tell, if or when this has changed. I'm not a Reaper user, I've only been testing the DDP and cue/bin export once in a while. But I don't remember having seen a binary CD text file with the additional 18 bytes we get now. E.g. your DDP attached to message #244 in this thread is OK.

Quote:
Originally Posted by vinx
I have already sent 2 ddps (with cd text) to the plant made with 4.31 and had no complaints about it (I'm on win xp 32bits).
Maybe I'll have to ask the clients for a cd, in order to check cd text...
Well that is always interesting, because it would show if the plant has done any changes to your master. I usually use ImgBurn to rip my pressed CDs, it gives you a nice *.cdt file, which should be identical to the CDTEXT.BIN from the DDP. You can send me both files, if you want me to have a look at the file format.

However, please note that even when the CD text is pressed on the disc with the additional 18 bytes, my guess is, that it will not cause much harm (on playback), because a forgiving CD Text parser will just ignore them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sergenious
Is it possible to get the detailed information what is broken now with CD-TEXT? Possibly an example of cdtext file? Or even better: could you give an example RPP file, with removed FX and without any media files (I can use empty audio clips to simulate), so I can debug what is happening.
Hi, Sergenious, great to read from you here! Look at my comment in the bug description, I'm quite sure, that'll be enough information for you. But maybe this helps too:

(Skip the rest if you're not a developer)
In the CDTEXT.BIN which groovenagle has posted in message #336, when opened in a hex editor with 18 bytes per line, this is how line 11 should look like:

80 07 0A 0F ..., not 80 07 0A 02 ...

My guess: you have something like
byte[4] |= char_pos & 0x0F;
and should simply add
if (char_pos > 0x0F) char_pos = 0x0F;
before that.

And then the very last line (8F 03 1D 00 ...) should simply not be there.
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Old 01-12-2013, 01:19 PM   #351
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Quote:
Originally Posted by anrug View Post
Hi, Sergenious, great to read from you here! Look at my comment in the bug description, I'm quite sure, that'll be enough information for you. But maybe this helps too:

(Skip the rest if you're not a developer)
In the CDTEXT.BIN which groovenagle has posted in message #336, when opened in a hex editor with 18 bytes per line, this is how line 11 should look like:

80 07 0A 0F ..., not 80 07 0A 02 ...

My guess: you have something like
byte[4] |= char_pos & 0x0F;
and should simply add
if (char_pos > 0x0F) char_pos = 0x0F;
before that.

And then the very last line (8F 03 1D 00 ...) should simply not be there.
Well, I am quite busy lately, and I haven't really been using Reaper, since I finished the last album for my band. So it was just a pure coincidence I saw this post.

Anyway, I found the post in the bug reports, together with CDTEXT.BIN file.
Your source code extract (I am doing it slightly differently) might be a cause of the problems, but I still need a problematic RPP example, so I can debug and confirm the cause. With all my RPP examples, I have never experiences any errors.

Long ago, I mentioned that CD-TEXT is done via unofficial documentation and reverse engineering, so I cannot guarantee that it will always work. That was the reason I didn't want to implement it in the first place. Only the comments by Reaper users persuaded me to do it.

On the other hand, DDP is officially documented, so I can stand for it (Also DDP is so simple, it can hardly be written in wrong way). For successful DDP image, only the red-book limitations must be considered (unfortunately Reaper cannot check them automatically, and there is no way to display an error), and of course the aligment to CD frames (1/75 sec).
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Old 01-13-2013, 03:34 AM   #352
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hi both,

attached is the reaper project file related to the CDTEXT.BIN file you're discussing. i hope it helps...

thanks and regards,
tim
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Old 01-16-2013, 03:07 PM   #353
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hi Andreas
I've attached the two cd text files for a ddp made with reaper 4.30 (I've not received those made with 4.31 yet)

bin is the ddp's one and the other is the cd pressed at the plant and ripped with imgburn. It seems to me they're not identical, but you can check if you have the time.
thanks
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Old 01-17-2013, 02:16 AM   #354
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vinx View Post
I've attached the two cd text files for a ddp made with reaper 4.30 (I've not received those made with 4.31 yet)

bin is the ddp's one and the other is the cd pressed at the plant and ripped with imgburn. It seems to me they're not identical, but you can check if you have the time.
Hi vinx, I've compared the two files and they indeed differ in a few minor spots:

1. The Reaper CD text file has the "character position" field set completely correct as far as I can say. (This is one of the flaw I had mentioned earlier.) It's important to note, that I doubt any CD player will read this field at all. The ripped CD text file has the field set correctly.

2. The Reaper CD text file has 18 additional bytes at the end of the file, these are not found in the ripped CD text file. It's worth mentioning, that I expect most parsers to silently skip those bytes.

3. The Reaper CD text file has the language set to "unknown", while the ripped CD text file has it set to "French".

4. The Reaper CD text file has as list of track start times embedded into one of the CD text section, the ripped CD text file has only the track count and total time in the same spot. It's again worth mentioning, that I'm not aware of any player reading this information, the "table of contents"(TOC) is stored somewhere else on the CD already. In fact, as far as I can tell neither Pyramix, nor Sonic, nor Sequoia is writing additional TOC information inside the CD text area. Reaper does, I don't know exactly why, maybe Sergeij knows more?

OK, so what does that all mean? I'm only 99% sure at this point, that ImgBurn is really showing the CD text data exactly as found on the disc.
But if so, I'd say:

1. You have a great plant, it silently fixed the two minor flaws in Reaper's CD text formatting

2. You might want to start setting the CD text language yourself, some plants have been complaining about the language not being set.

3. (Most important) The CD text on the pressed disc looks fine.

Hope this helps! Let me know, if you have any questions.
Best
Andreas

Last edited by anrug; 01-17-2013 at 01:34 PM.
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Old 01-17-2013, 02:46 AM   #355
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Andreas, seems it's really the case with charPos. The problem is in the long titles which "groovenagl" is using. I have never used such long names, so I didn't face such problems. CD-TEXT spec is really one of the worst formats ever, so it leaves ambiguity about the long texts.

Are you sure that putting "0x0F" for longer texts will be ok? Because charPos tells how many chars from the previous pack must be used in the current text. And if there is more than 15 chars already, what happens then?
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Old 01-17-2013, 03:45 AM   #356
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Originally Posted by Sergenious View Post
CD-TEXT spec is really one of the worst formats ever, so it leaves ambiguity about the long texts.
I think you're absolutely right. Basically I have no idea what charPos can be good for at all, it's certainly not needed when reading the CD text. According to the reports earlier in this thread, not even the Eclipse Analyzer complains about the content of this field. Also all software I've seen to open DDPs, will ignore this field.

Quote:
Are you sure that putting "0x0F" for longer texts will be ok? Because charPos tells how many chars from the previous pack must be used in the current text. And if there is more than 15 chars already, what happens then?
Well, I'd say, you can safely put "0x0F" in there for long strings. That's what Pyramix (i.e. Gear) and Sequoia do, and those applications have been used for many years by hundreds of mastering engineers (I have very limited access to SADiE and Soundblade has been very late to support CD text).

The trouble with any CD text format description I've found, is that it's probably written by Japanese people for Sony, and the English text is almost non-understandable, and leaves a lot to guess. But there is a US Patent (by SONY), which names the field (last four bits of fourth byte) "characters position of current pack" (weird naming) and explicitly states "0x0F = sixteenth or later character".

Last but not least, that plant that vinx used, did apparently exactly that: it put in "0x0F" when there were 16 or more characters in the string before the start of the current pack.

If I had a bit more spare money I'd maybe invest in a full Red Book, but really I'm not sure that would clear things up completely, the description may as incomplete as all official description I've found over the years.

Aside from the official documents I think a good source now is from the "libcdio" open source project, which--like e.g. cdrecord, cdrdao--include a CD text encoder an decoder: http://www.gnu.org/software/libcdio/cd-text-format.html

Last edited by anrug; 01-17-2013 at 03:54 AM.
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Old 01-17-2013, 04:00 AM   #357
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Andreas, Ok, then I'll change the sources to put 0x0F for longer texts.
I don't have enough time to analyze everything, are you sure with this groovenagl's problems will be solved?
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Old 01-17-2013, 04:06 AM   #358
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Quote:
Originally Posted by anrug View Post
In fact, as far as I can tell neither Pyramix, nor Sonic, nor Sequoia is writing additional TOC information inside the CD text area. Reaper does, I don't know exactly why, maybe Sergeij knows more?
Because Sonoris does it, and I wanted my CD-TEXT to be binary the same
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Old 01-17-2013, 04:10 AM   #359
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Originally Posted by anrug View Post
3. The Reaper CD text file has the language set to "unknown", while the ripped CD text file has it set to "French".
Reaper is always setting the language, however if not being explicitly set by the markers, 0 is used, which represent unknown. Why the plant would convert "unknown" to "French", is strange.
I wonder if I should use "English" as default?
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Old 01-17-2013, 05:56 AM   #360
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Originally Posted by Sergenious View Post
Reaper is always setting the language, however if not being explicitly set by the markers, 0 is used, which represent unknown. Why the plant would convert "unknown" to "French", is strange.
I wonder if I should use "English" as default?
Yes, I think you should. Makes things simpler for the user.

Basically up until a few years ago, no mastering software I've seen would allow the user to even specify the language, most would silently set it to "unknown", some did silently set it to "English". Then, all of a sudden Eclipse changed their DDP Verification rules to not allow "unknown" any more, and vendors of mastering software had to cope with that. So, since a few years ago, defaulting "English" seems the way to go, I'd say.

Quote:
Andreas, Ok, then I'll change the sources to put 0x0F for longer texts.
I don't have enough time to analyze everything, are you sure with this groovenagl's problems will be solved?
Aside from that, just make sure, that there a exactly three "size info" packs. And yes, I believe with this two changes, grovenagl's problems will be solved. Many thanks for your effort!

Quote:
Because Sonoris does it, and I wanted my CD-TEXT to be binary the same.
OK, I see. Fair enough, it's recently been used a lot, so there certainly can't be much wrong with it's formatting. I have to admit, that I haven't analysed too many Sonoris DDPs, simply because the software was not around, when I did write my first DDP and CD text creation code.

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