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…