Description

 

VerifyCD compares a CD Audio with the master sound file available on your hard disk by verifying that a burned CD premaster or the final pressed CD in fact has identical sound data with the master file. 

The demo version has full professional functionality but limited to 5 min comparison.
Download the demo version here.

Who needs this utility?

Everybody who burns CD-Audio records and wants to make sure that the audio data is correct! There is less error correction used for audio CDs than for normal file system CDs and errors are likely to occur depending on the quality of the CD-R medium. Without a utility like VerifyCD it is simply necessary to listen to the whole record to make sure that there are no pops or glitches. The situation is even worse since you may not notice an error because of the error correction embedded in all CD players. VerifyCD makes sure that the digital data on the disc is equal to the master file. Professional users like CD manufacturing plants and Radio/TV stations are now using this as a quick, reliable and inexpensive method.

 

The glasmastering plant will run a quality check of the CD measuring error rate and pit geometry, so refer this part of the testing to them. You cannot do error rate testing by listening since you are dependant on the CD player used.

 

The product exists in two flavours – Normal and Professional. The difference in functionality
is given in the following table:

 

 

Normal

Professional

Two files comparison

(Master and CD)

X

X

Pregap/Postgap support

X

X

Many files, typically one per track that will be concatenated during the comparison

 

X

Pyramix Image file

 

X

Eclipse Image file

 

X

CDRWIN Image file

 

X

 

User Experience

We have numerous examples over the years that this utility has tracked a problem while listening has not.

 

This software in its original form has been used since 1996 by www.sonoconsult.se, all records mentioned under the recent_recordings tag and several more have been checked by this procedure, no case where any listening session has found a problem not found by VerifyCD exists.

 

If you get the message “Equal files” you do not need to listen. The digital data representing the sound on the CD is identical to the master. 

 

The software tries to re-sync after an error is found. This may not always succeed if it takes considerable processing time. This is because the CD should be rejected anyway as soon as an error is found.

 

The use of PREGAP and POSTGAP commands that puts silence before or after a track on the CD is supported. This means that the files are considered equal even if silence is inserted anywhere on the CD.

 

The use of VerifyCD should be sufficient in most cases in order to make sure that the CD has the right sound stream, but many sound engineers still want to do a final listen. The use of this utility saves time to track any clicks or pops on the burned CD. The comparison only takes a few minutes on a modern PC or MAC. 

Installation

 

VerifyCD is 100% written in Java and will therefore run on all Java-supported platforms (Java 1.3 or higher) – PC, MAC, Linux and more. The only prerequisite is that the java runtime from SUN is installed.

 

VerifyCD is one and only one file – VerifyCD.jar with a size less than 100 Kb and additional documentation. No other files are installed into system directories; no environment variables need to be set and the system registry is not touched. 

 

Uninstallation is therefore a simple deletion of the installation directory.

Quality

 

The program is developed using Extreme Programming (www.extremeprogramming.org) . We have a number of audio files in a test-bed accompanied by test programs that specify most alternatives of input data and program results. This test-bed verifies the coding. The use of extreme programming practices lowers the risk of bugs to an absolute minimum. If you find a bug we will be happy to receive two sound files (with minimum size) that reproduce the bug and will consider to add them to our test achieve so that the bug is sure not to appear in future releases.

.

Usage

  1. Listen to the final mixed master sound file in your computer. Use one large file for the whole CD.
  2. Burn the premaster using your favourite software, e.g. CDRWIN from www.goldenhawk.com.
  3. If you run the professional version and use a Plextor drive for reading you can install Plextor manager 2000 and enable AudioFS. This utility runs on all Windows platforms (including WinXP) and presents the audio tracks as WAV files. You can then read directly from the CD without ripping back to harddisk before verifying.
    With the Normal version you need to rip the premaster back to hard disc as one large WAV, AIFF, SND or AU file. The same format (i.e. the same encoding, the same sampling rate, the same number of channels, the same bit resolution and the same sample byte order) as your master file must be used. Both normal wave files and Broadcast wave files can be used. We recommend using Exact Audio copy from http://www.exactaudiocopy.de but any software package can be used as long as the resulting file is in one of the supported formats mentioned above
  4. Run VerifyCD. If you get the message “Equal files”, the sound data on the CD is binary bit for bit equal to the master file. Limitation: Each track must be longer than 2 seconds. This is because VerifyCD will try to resync data after a difference is found and will need approx. 1 second of data to do this.
    Most glasmastering plants run further tests to verify Redbook compliance before making the glasmaster.
  5. Make a copy of the CD premaster.
  6. Verify the PQ, ISRC and MSN codes using your CD burning or CD ripping utility.

The demo version has full professional functionality but limited to 5 min comparison.
Download the demo version here.