July 15, 2003---Interhack today makes the first public release of a tool to test CDs for conformance to standards. The intention is to determine if manufacturers of audio CDs and CDROM drives are doing the right thing. There's a command line and a Qt based interface (written using "designer").
This is not yet a general release: it is targeted to programmers looking to become active developers.
It's written in C++ for Linux and FreeBSD but the intention is to allow it to work on other systems. The device interface works at a fairly low-level by sending ATAPI commands directly to the CDROM. Strangely, this made the results more consistent (every operating system tries to abstract the CDROM away which loses all the info I want) and more portable as the biggest porting effort is figuring out how to send the command directly to the device rather then trying to compensate for the OS's compensations.
Personally, I think it's fairly decent code.
I've reached the stage where I need some fresh eyes and new ideas before sending it out to the rest of the world and thought the Opensource group would be a good start. If anyone is interested in:
Please join the mailing list: http://web.interhack.com/mailman/listinfo/cdverity
and/or download the code: http://www.interhack.net/projects/01media/cdverity-1.08.tgz
Feel free to send me or the list email, suggestions, patches. After a short time (1-2 months), we'll work on a wider distribution.