You must have all seen it, Plextor has released a new version of their, by now, famous PlexTools. Today version 1.15 was released to the public.

As you must have also seen, CD Freaks has written a nice review on it (it convinced me to upgrade my PlexTools version). To read the review, you can go here:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=89

But what I would like to know is, have you yourself tried it and what are your experiences with this latest version of PlexTools, please post your experiences below.

Especially, we'd like to know the secure audio reading speeds on clean CDs compared to the different EAC secure modes, and if it can be trusted when it says no errors occured.

As I said in the comment on the news page, errors are erratic. In the EAC log, the first time, track 1 had no errors and track 3 had, while the opposite occured the second time.
So Plextools could have got a perfect result by chance. More tests have to be done.

I can send killer CDRs that always make EAC fail on my drives (Memorex, Teac, Sony), that is, no errors reported while there are some, if someone has the time and will to extract them, compare them, and process them in a wav editor i order to show the differences, like I did in http://www.audio-illumination.org/fo...ST&f=20&t=3164

Also, can it extract by range ? Or extract hidden tracks ? Multisession CDs ?

So, dose that mean if I'm a U.S. customer that im out of luck?

Yes.
Unless you can find an old full version on some website.
Like this one

So can this be used fully on other drives? I have heard that it can't, and then people arguing that it can, so can it or can't it?

Thanks for the link, saw something refering to this site on an earlier site, but no link was provided.

Two people reported that the advanced audio extraction was greyed out on systems that didn't have any Plextor drive.

I can confirm this.
It only works with Plextor drives.

Some features will work with non-Plextor drives but the 'DAE Error Recovery' feature was written for Plextor drives and will only work with Plextor drives (at least that's the case here on my system). Note that I could extract audio with a different drive but the advanced DAE Error Recovery options just don't work. Only the LOG function works.

So has anyone done anymore tests? As you can see from my article I did some tests but one major problem is that it takes a lot of time to test extracted tracks which I currently do not have since I'm going on vacation on Sunday morning and have to take care of some personal things first

I wonder how legal this link is....

I've made my first test with Plextools 1.15 (Ultraplex 40 max, f 1.13).

1 : it's very fast. With the 5th level, it extracted at 17x, versus 9x for EAC 9.4 in secure mode. (I have selected level 5, allow speed reduction but i had left retries to 1. I'm going to settle retries to 5).

2 : The sound of the cd-r i've just written seems incredibly natural ! Maybe i'm fooling myself but that's the first impression i had. It's not very technical but that feeling was very strong.

3 : So far, no errors of any kind.

4 : My experience in audio extraction : easy cd creator 3.5 (audibles errors with scratched cd), plextor manager (never any error but it wasn't very handy, except that you could select audio quality extraction from 1 to 100), plextools (strange errors : little silents, 1/10 of a second), EAC (never any audible errors, but can be very slow), Plextools 1.15.

I don't see anything wrong with the content (it's not my website btw.) unless you consider PlexTools as illegal software.

I have no idea, but the fact that Plextools was not shipped with US drives means that those with US drives don't have a license to use this software.

But, since this software can only be used with and I have no idea what the licensing policy is, I will allow this unless Plextor tells me this is not allowed.

Well, when you start PlexTools they mention it's freely available for Plextor customers in Europe, Africa and Middle-East.
So it may be illegal software for US customers

My test results:

The disc I used was a special test disc with 15 damaged audio tracks. Track 1 is slightly damaged while track 15 is extremely damaged.

1st problem: PlexTools aborts with a read error with tracks 8-15.
So I used track 7 for all tests.
I also ran the tests with CD DAE to verify the results.

Plextor PX-W1210A v1.05
==================
PlexTools Mode 5, retries 3
Speed 2.3x (time 1:03) errors:0
Compared with original: 0 errors

EAC Secure mode (C2)
Speed 0.3x (time 7:53) errors:?
track quality: 96.8%
Compared with original: 4116 missing samples, 4116 repeated samples

CD DAE (only error detection, no error correction)
Read Twice
Speed 9.0x (time 0:16) errors:150493
C2 Pointers
Speed 17.3x (time 0:08) errors:441846

LiteOn LTD163 vGH5E
===============
PlexTools
Speed 17.1x (time 0:08) errors:0
Compared with original: 0 errors

EAC Secure mode (C2)
Speed 2.9x (time 0:49) errors:?
track quality: 99.8%
Compared with original: 0 errors

CD DAE (only error detection, no error correction)
Read Twice
Speed 10.1x (time 0:14) errors:0
C2 Pointers
Speed 20.0x (time 0:07) errors:0


Conclusion:
EAC is by far the slowest ripper. And it cannot rip the track without errors with the Plextor.
PlexTools is not only much faster but it can extract the track without errors!
I also prefer the interface of PlexTools. It will tell you exactly what is happening and shows the exact number of errors.

My opinion:
Forget all this error correction crap. Just use a decent reader such as the LiteOn LTD163 in combination with a ripper who can detect errors.

Nice tests cdrfreak2!

"Forget all this error correction crap. Just use a decent reader such as the LiteOn LTD163 in combination with a ripper who can detect errors."

I don't understand your point, Cdfreak2. Do you mean it's not worth buying a Plex and using software such as EAC or Plextools ?

If this is what you meant, i can't agree. DAE with a liteon and Nero or EZCD is not as good as DAE with a Plex and EAC or Plextools.

No, you really should use a ripper which has at least a verify function.
However if the disc is in good shape then you should get the same results with a LiteOn and Nero/EZCD.
The problem is that you don't know if the quality is 100% with Nero/EZCD.

My point is that if you have a good drive you probably don't need a ripper with error correction capabilities (compare Plextor results with LiteOn results).

I will run some more tests with the Plextor PX-40TS because the Plextor PX-W1210A is not very good at DAE (at least not with firmware 1.05).
Unfortunately I don't have a recent Plextor drive so I don't know how their DAE capabilities are.

More test results!

Toshiba SD-M1612 v1004
======================
CD DAE
Read Twice
Speed 9.4x (time 0:15) errors:1030
C2 Pointers
Speed 18.3x (time 0:07) errors:960

Well, that's not so bad. Not as good as the LiteOn but 1000 errors is not much.
However, it is surprising that there are less errors with the C2 pointers. Normally it should be the other way around.

PlexTools
Speed 15.1x (time 0:09) errors:0
Compared with original: 20

Problem! It's not just the error correction that doesn't work with non-Plextor drives, but also the error detection.

EAC
Speed 2.9x (time 0:49) errors:?
Track Quality 97.2%
Compared with original: 112

So why is EAC unable to correct all errors? The Toshiba does not have much trouble to read the track.
The answer can be found in the CD DAE results. The Toshiba does not report all C2 errors correctly.

So let's try with C2 disabled.

EAC
Speed 1.0x (time 2:22) errors:?
Track Quality 98.5%
Compared with original: 0

There you have it!

Plextor PX-40TS V1.11
=====================
CD DAE
Read Twice
Speed 10.6x (time 0:13) errors:903100

Hmm...almost a million errors. Not good.

PlexTools
Speed 0.3x (time 9:29) errors:15003
Compared with original: 12593

Still a lot of errors.

EAC
Speed 0.4x (time 5:29) errors:?
Track Quality 96.4%
Compared with original: 7671

Better but not perfect.

So let's check EAC without C2.

EAC
Speed 0.1x (time 17:23) errors:?
Track Quality 98.1%
Compared with original: 1095

Well, that's the best I can get.

Conclusion:
- EAC - PlexTools : 1-1
- C2 error information cannot be trusted even though EAC says it is supported.
- For non-Plextor drives PlexTools is just another ripper.

But why are the results from both my Plextor drives so bad?
They get their butts kicked big time by the LiteOn and Toshiba.
It must be old age
Maybe someone can run some tests with a recent Plextor?

I ripped the entire linkin park hybrid theory in under 2 mins with the 401240a, retries to 99, and the error correction set to the last option (the one that said something abot recxovering the best bytes from sectors)

The new PlexTools crashes when I try to run it...
Had the same problem with an eariler upgrade also, then I fixed it by uppgrading Intel App Acc.
Hopefully it is the same problem this time....will look into it this weekend.

some more intresting links on this matter:

forum thread on hydrogen audio

My own thread on the official forum of EAC

It is said that c2 error correction of Plextor drives is greatly improved in the newer Plextor drives (>=16sp) compared to their older drives. But on the other side I always heard that my 'old' PX-40Tsi reader was also able to deliver correct c2 information.

Can anybody shed some light on this issue?

On his forum, Andre Wiethoff, the author of EAC, answered me that "Accurate Stream" was more reliable than "c2 correction".

I was reporting on that forum my experience with "c2 correction" : a lot faster. But i was surprised that the default settings of EAC didn't use c2.

So now i'd like to know if Plextools 1.15 improved c2 correction for that drive and not only for new ones.

Btw, in Plextools 1.15 drive information, with a plex40ts, it is said that firmware 1.13 is "upon release of this plextools version".

What does it mean ?

It means that 1.13 is the latest version available for the PX-40TS at the time this version of PlexTools was released.

Firmware v1.13 was released in may 2001.

I'm going to upgrade my Plex PX-40TS and re-run the tests.
They seem to have made many important improvements for DAE since v1.11