Holy cow.
Cdparanoia 10pre0 is now up at xiph.org as a test release of the upcoming 10.0, the first official release of cdparanoia in five years. This release marks a return of cdparanoia to active development here at xiph.org.
The 10.0 release brings cdparanoia up to date with bugfixes, submitted patches and kernel interface changes over the period since the release of 9.8 back in 2001. Most importantly, cdparanoia adds official support for
SG_IO. There are no new features in this release; it’s intended to bring the project up to date before resuming development.
I don’t know what kind of manpower is behind the repositories at Xiph, but I know that projects have a tendency to go into hibernation there: Vorbis hasn’t seen any major work lately, and whispers of “Vorbis II” have been floating around since before v1 was even officially stable. cdparanoia is the de facto ripping library in Linux, and it was an absolute shame that it hadn’t seen an update since 2001—Exact Audio Copy has been spanking it, the only real recourse for decent ripping was either run EAC in wine or to get something like RubyRipper, which uses cdparanoia more effectively.
I’d like nothing more than to see cdparanoia up to snuff. I’ve mentioned before that the dearth of decent ripping support is one of the major defecits of desktop Linux.