That was a hell of a work. Someone should write a tutorial for SafeDisc + Mixed Mode. 
Also some of the information here should be put in the official Mixed Mode tutorial, so people know why they are doing what they are doing.
1 2010-10-20 19:55:50
Re: Combined offset in EAC (14 replies, posted in General discussion)
2 2010-10-20 19:12:37
Re: Combined offset in EAC (14 replies, posted in General discussion)
Now that the audio tracks are properly ripped, I got one last question:
Is dumping the whole disc with DDump and extracting the first track (via Extract From-To: Length) from the image with IsoBuster a proper solution for a mixed mode SafeDisc CD?
3 2010-10-19 22:03:52
Re: Combined offset in EAC (14 replies, posted in General discussion)
amarok wrote:
The bigger problem I think is that you won't be able to detect a negative offset larger than your drive's positive offset with IsoBuster ^^ If you've read the guide you maybe know that you have to go back 150 sectors (in case of a 2 sec pregap) and count how many rows of junk data you see (because the end of the junk data marks the beginning of track 2). However, if the disc's negative factory offset is too large, you won't see said junk but only 00s, so there's no way to determine the start of track 2, respectively the combined read offset.
As far as I understand, you might have to go further back to another sector if the offset is too large. And of course I've read the guide. 
Thanks again! I'll post a proper dump of Seven Kingdoms II (german) by tomorrow!
4 2010-10-19 21:28:41
Re: Combined offset in EAC (14 replies, posted in General discussion)
Thanks! Now it all makes sense! It's always better to understand what you're doing and why. I ripped many audio discs with EAC but those issues with mixed mode CDs never occured to me.
amarok wrote:
That said, it's possible that EAC loses samples at the beginning of the 1st audio track if the combined offset is negative. It's an annoying EAC quirk. You'll have to make sure that your drive's offset "outweighs" the negative factory offset. I have an LG with +667 which I use to dump -647 (a common PSX factory offset) or similar. If you're lucky, you have a Plextor. In this case you can use PlexTools, which doesn't seem to be affected by that problem
I have Pioneer DVD drive with a combined offset of +48, but I don't intend to dump any PSX titles. Also, shouldn't reading into the Lead-In solve the problem?
amarok wrote:
As for IsoBuster, it does know where the data track ends, but it appends the pregap of the 2nd track to it. The reason we need to cut that off is because redump handles the gaps differently. IsoBuster appends a track's gap to the end of the previous track (so the Track 2 pregap is put at the end of Track 1), while redump prepends the gap to the track it actually belongs to (pregap, as per cue specification ^^).
Appending the gap to the previous track is kind of a hackish solution to allow people to listen to their audio tracks without having the (mostly silent) pregap at the beginning.
Appending the pregaps to the next track is also needed to get ISO compliant Cue Sheets and according binaries, makes sense!
Thanks for all your answers! They helped a lot!
Would be cool if the developer of EAC decided to include automatic correction of factory write offsets using the data track to allign the sectors. Then mixed mode rips could be even "more lossless" than audio only rips.
5 2010-10-19 21:02:46
Re: Combined offset in EAC (14 replies, posted in General discussion)
r09 wrote:
Data tracks have the same offset, but it gets corrected automatically by the drive, using the sync marks (those 00 FF FF FF... at the start of each sector) as reference.
I see! And since there is no sync mark on the audio tracks, IsoBuster doesn't automatically know where the data track ends? Am I understanding that right?
6 2010-10-19 20:48:11
Re: Combined offset in EAC (14 replies, posted in General discussion)
If I understand you correctly, this is ment to make sure the data track ends at the right sector and the audio track starts with the right one. Makes sense!
Is there no write offset for data tracks, only for audio tracks? If I get a negative factory write offset, doesn't that mean, the data track and the first audio track are overlapping?
7 2010-10-19 19:21:04
Topic: Combined offset in EAC (14 replies, posted in General discussion)
Hi, do I really need to follow the steps for the combined offset in the tutorial? I have set the correct offset with Accurate Rip, shouldn't ripping the data track with IsoBuster and ripping the audio tracks with EAC/Accurate Rip be enough? Or is there something I'm missing?
Thanks in advance for your help!