I originally wanted to put out the next version as 0.9 beta, but now it only got to 0.9 prebeta 10. I force this release out as there were some major improvements and bugfixes that many users asked for day by day. It does not contain all features of 0.9 beta, but it is comes quite near, only some more additions to the wave editor are missing.
The following main changes are made from 0.9pb9 :

  • Again many bug fixes (ID3V2 tag size for VBR header, Ricoh writing, compression in the background, etc.)
  • It is now possible to specify a different naming scheme for various artist CDs
  • The power down computer option can now be selected during extraction
  • Submission of drive features to a central database to share information with other users which don’t know the features of their drives or also to combine ones offset if several different results occured on detection.
  • ID3V2.3.0 tag support (previous version only wrote only ID3V2.4.0, which can’t be read correctly by a majority of tag/play utilities)
  • In order to access more devices on interfaces like USB, Firewire and of course IDE and SCSI drives, EAC is now able to use the ASAPI interface of VOB instead of ASPI or Native SCSI
  • If you own a multiprocessor system, you can start several encoding threads in the background to speed up compression
  • To use the newest Fraunhofer FastEnc MP3 encoder on-the-fly, EAC is now able to access the CoolEdit Pro MP3 PlugIn if copied to the EAC directory (fht.flt)
  • On external compression, the user defined encoder can use any file extension, Ogg Vorbis and RKAU are now supported as external command line encoders
  • Using Undo in processing waveform is now optional
  • EAC now uses FreeDB exclusively, to update your server list, use the “Get active FreeDB server list” function
  • Interpolation – Replace Frequency works fine now (I am quite satisfied with it now :)
  • EAC is able to use LAME.EXE (.MP3) and MPPDEC.EXE (.MP+ and .MPC) for decompression and for on-the-fly writing of CDs. Just copy the executables to the EAC directory. For MP3 decompression with LAME.EXE it is also necessary to either not having the MP3 Fraunhofer codec installed or to select the option in the compression options. Beware : You need the most actual versions of both programs as previous versions introduced errors in the decompression (sometimes even total trash). So decode a file once using EAC to make sure it is decoded correctly!
  • Some more smaller additions… ;))

Hope you will like this version!
I also tried to use the SHN Decoder shortn32.exe for on-the-fly decompression/writing in EAC, but the decompressor has some bugs making this impossible. It allows to write the decompressed output to the StdOut pipe, but it does not set the binary mode correctly. You could try it by yourself by decompressing using “shortn32 -x abc.shn – >abc.wav” , it will change endian and channels all over the file…