Plextor PlexTools

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G@M3FR3@K
Senior Moderator: Article posted 03 Sep 02 14:07

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Introduction

Review: Plextor PlexTools
Version: v1.15a
Reviewer: G@M3FR3@K
Provided by: Plextor Europe

This time we’re not going to do another review but we’re going to take a look at a software package called PlexTools. This software is delivered with the European Plextor drives and was specially designed to get the maximum performance out of your Plextor drive. You can use PlexTools for instance to get more information on your drive, tweak its settings and besides that you can use it to play audio discs (with support for CD-Text) and of course you can use PlexTools to copy CD’s or to make your own audio compilations with.

In this small review we’re going to take a look at the latest PlexTools version that is scheduled to be shipped with Plextor’s latest recorders, the PX-W4824A and PX-W4824TU (USB 2.0 drive will be shipped with PlexTools v1.16) drives. PlexTools v1.15a, just like the drives itself, are not available yet but Plextor Europe was kind enough to already send us this new PlexTools version and allow us to test its new features and especially its new DAE Error Recovery feature.

Introduction:

In the early Plextor days when you bought a Plextor drive you would get the Plextor Manager software with your drive. It didn’t matter if you bought your drive in Europe, America or where ever since all drives were shipped with the same software. Plextor Europe also delivered the Plextor Manager software with their drives. Perhaps it was time to start making their own software and that’s exactly what Plextor Europe did. PlexTools was born!

Test Machine:

For the tests we’ll be using the following configuration:

Hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS K7V
Processor: AMD Athlon 700Mhz
RAM: 256MB (PC133)
GFX: ASUS V8200 (GeForce 3 Ti200)
Hard Disk: Maxtor 30GB 7200rpm (UDMA66)
IDE Controller: PCI UDMA100 Controller
USB Controller: NEC USB 2.0 Controller

System set-up:

As you can see we have three Plextor drives hooked up to our computer: the Plextor PX-W4012A, the PX-W4012TU and the PleXCombo PX-320A. For the PlexTools review we’ll be using all three drives. The Windows XP Professional operating system is installed on our test machine.

On the next page we’ll take a look at “look & feel” of the PlexTools software…

Program Overview

11 Comments

TBZ: Posts: 125; Posted on: 03 Sep 02 16:24

Quote:

As you can see from the table the PlexTools software showed some excellent results and the program could decrease the amount of errors in track two with 67%!

I'm sorry I must of skimmed passed this somewhere in your article. How did you arrive at this figure? And also, do you think PT is better at DAE than EAC now?

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 03 Sep 02 17:31

Very nice. But a question Why binary comparison did was made with Plextor utility? why with only one track, probabily different from the tree of preceding comparison?

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 03 Sep 02 18:25

TBZ: Mode 1: Track 2 - 500.613 errors Mode 5: Track 2 - 162.028 errors A decrease of 67%. Unfortunately EAC doesn't have a detailed LOG-file with all the errors so we can't compare both programs here and that's why we did a binary comparison. pippocalo: we did some more tests and got the same result: EAC extracted damaged audio tracks that were different from the original file. PlexTools created the exact same files regardless if the track was damaged or not. It's very hard to tell the quality otherwise so we did a binary comparison. Yes we used a utility developed by Plextor but that doesn't make a difference in the achieved results.

Pio2001: Posts: 370; Posted on: 03 Sep 02 20:00

I'd like to know the ripping speed with clean CDs. EAC is often slow in secure mode.

Mastakilla: Posts: 465; Posted on: 03 Sep 02 20:01

hmz very strange EAC didnt do better in the binary comparison... did EAC actually said there were problems with extracting? or did it just say everything was ok? and have u noticed any hearable difference once? cause i dont think that 1000 bytes are hearable... would love to see a reaction from the creators of eac on this one

Pio2001: Posts: 370; Posted on: 03 Sep 02 20:20

As I understood, there were no errors reported. However, 1032 bytes are 258 samples, that is at most 258 errors, at least 43. Unfortunately we don't know the number of errors detected during EAC's rip. Keep in mind that errors are erratic : look at the EAC logs, in low, track 1 has no errors while track 3 has, while in medium, it is the opposite. It is possible that the Plextor success and EAC failure are within the same uncertainty, and can be reversed in another rip. More tests must be conducted. I can send you some killer CDs for error recovery : bad CDRs that always make EAC report no error while there are (on my Memorex-Teac-Sony drives)

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 05 Sep 02 09:20

Maybe they should retry the EAC test, but WITHOUT using C2, I don't think C2 is reliable on new plextors.

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 05 Sep 02 17:54

For more results confirming our test results please check out this thread on our Plextor forum.

SatCP: Posts: 13; Posted on: 05 Sep 02 19:08

I've been very close to the development of the new PlexTools software, so let me shred some light on it... First let me say the audio extraction engine is completely renewed. Earlier versions of PlexTools don't even come close to the new PlexTools version when it comes to extraction quality. Pio2001:

Quote:

I'd like to know the ripping speed with clean CDs. EAC is often slow in secure mode.

On an undamaged CD the extraction speed will be equal or very close to that of regular burst extraction software (AudioGrabber, CDex,...). In other words, as fast as possible.

Quote:

It is possible that the Plextor success and EAC failure are within the same uncertainty, and can be reversed in another rip. More tests must be conducted.

I've done extensive tests of which I cannot publish the results (but when I have more time to get a new site online, I'll redo 'em). The conclusion is: the new PlexTools is superior to EAC. This thanks to the use of burst extraction mode to read data and C2 information to detect errors. When an error occurs PlexTools can choose from 5 different extraction schemes, ranked from normal to extreme secure. Let's say that scheme 5 is selected. Because of the C2 information PlexTools knows exactly which samples (not just sectors!) are correct and which are not. PlexTools will then recover the correct samples whereas EAC may not find enough matching sectors to restore the original data. sikkek:

Quote:

Maybe they should retry the EAC test, but WITHOUT using C2, I don't think C2 is reliable on new plextors.

Au contraire! In fact, the C2 error detection of the newer Plextor drives is so reliable that the whole error detection/correction mechanism is built around it. And the numbers don't lie... Older plextor drives (8/4/32 for example) have a rather unreliable C2 error detection. These drives will not benefit from this software. The new PlexTools will only work reliable when the C2 information is reliable. Drives with no or non-reliable C2 error detection will still get the best results with EAC. Of course, at the price of a much lower extraction speed.

guest: Posts: 15284; Posted on: 05 Sep 02 19:32

Thank you for your input SatCP!

alan1476: Posts: 17101; Posted on: 21 Nov 08 18:19

This is great software. Its easy and the final product is great, if you want to put movies on your IPOD, this is the program to do it with.

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Plextor PlexTools

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