For a while I’ve been intending to encode my CD collection into a lossless format - I’m sick and tired of having to re-encode my already encoded CDs because the format the files are in isn’t supported by a particular device or because the lossy bitrate I used was too low. My plan is to store all my CDs in FLAC format and then transcode as and when needed (heck, it can even be done on the fly).

Today I set up abcde, my favourite encoding tool, on majestic, my AlphaServer 800, running NetBSD 3.0. Once pkgsrc had finished installing everything, I configured abcde and fired it up to try and encode my first CD.

Unfortunately, it started spitting out errors, claiming that the CD didn’t contain any audio. I then ran cdparanoia -vsQ to try and see what cdparanoia thought of the drive. After checking the drive, it spat out the following:
Unable to find any suitable command set from probe;
drive probably not CDDA capable.

How odd - most drives manufactured in the last 10 years support CDDA (the drive in question is a DEC RRD47, a 32x SCSI drive, in this case manufactured by Toshiba). After some Googling, I found the following cdda2wav commit message:
added the DEC RRD47 drive as not mmc/readCD capable

Oh great. Of all the CD-ROM drives in the universe, I have to get one that can’t do CDDA. This is annoying - I really hate opening majestic’s case, so I think I’ll go with an external drive until I’m forced to open it. More on this tomorrow…

PS: The CD I tried was Metallica’s S&M. Perhaps Lars Ulrich or the RIAA had their hand in this…