Ripping New Enhanced CD's

[SAMIAM779]

First off, I'm not supporting piracy here, I bought the cd in question and am using the mp3's legally.

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I thought this might be of use. I've had problems before ripping the last track off of an enhanced CD, because it gets blurred with the data track and generates an error. But I've never had any problem with ripping them beyond that.

However, I just got a new enhanced CD other day ("Blueprint" -Ginny Owens) that would not rip at all. Basically here's the deal:

1. The CD auto-played with a video inside of a full-screen Macromedia Flash-based player, so defaulting audio cd's to a ripping program didn't work.

2. Browsing the CD only revealed data files, even with hidden files enabled.

3. No ripping program would see any audio files within the CD.

So, after a few hours of work, I finally managed to rip the cd. Here's how, with an explaination to follow. Hopefully it will be useful to anyone who has problems with these kinds of cd's.

1. Used cd burning software (CloneCD, which is very dependable for such things) to make an image of the CD, and specified that it should be created as an "audio CD" image.

2. Used Daemon Tools (www.daemon-tools.com) to mount the image as though it were a CD rom.

3. Used my normal mp3 software (Audiocatalyst- www.xingtech.com) to rip the CD.

What the problem was and why this method worked:

Enhanced CD's contain 2 tracks, one audio and one data. Though it's not really correct to call them tracks, more like sessions. It is (as I understand it) almost like burning 2 cd's to one disk. So basically, a given program/device will only "see" one of the two sessions.

Now, on traditional enhanced cd's, the data track is burned AFTER the audio track. On this cd, though, the data track was put on there FIRST, and that's where the problem comes in. If I put the CD into a cd player, it is looking for ONLY a music track, so it ignores the data session as being basically junk and moves on. However, since a computer can read either session, it just looks for the first thing found on the disk. When it finds the data session, it mounts the CD as a data CD and can't really see the music files.

However, when you create the CD burning image, you're telling it to make an audio CD, so that the software (like a CD player) looks ONLY for the audio files. That way, the image you create only contains the music, not the data.

From there, it's all downhill. Daemon tools mounts the CD image as an audio cd, because that's all that's there. (You could also burn a copy of just the image, then rip it, but this saves you a step) Then the ripping software rips the files as though they were on any other CD.

I'm sure there's a good chance people have already run into this and gotten around it, but I thought I'd post it just in case.

[justin_tx_16]

I backup all the music I buy onto my computer. I had this same thing happen to me with a No Doubt CD I bought, their latest, Rock Steady.

I made an image of the CD and extracted the CDA file and went from there. It took a lot of work to actually get the file addresses since the files themselves were hidden beyond what I could see behind other hidden files. When all else fails I am just happy to have my GTXP. Then I output the digital soundtrack playing through winamp straight back into its digital input where MediaJukebox records the tracks and I assign it a CDDB CD and it is done. Only this takes the length of the cd... grrr

[mkl]

How a lot of the new copyprotection cds is this:

A normal cd has a TOC or table of contents saying where on the discs various files or tracks are.

On computer based cdroms, this can be updated. For example if you change the toc it would have the original toc, but now would point to a new spot (its kind of like a linked list for those familiar with programming)

Now a audio cd player, not a computer based on, is not designed to look any further than the ORIGINAL TOC.

So when you curropt the toc in a certain way, computer based CDROMs get very confused, and won't find any data.

Audio cd players (like a standard stereo cdc player) Dont care, they just look at the original TOC.

So, this is how a cdrom on your computer CANT see the information, but your standard home cd player can.

I've dealt with this quite a bit (I'm a computer programmer) if you want a more technical description I can give it. I intentionally abstracted this a little bit just for the ease of the non-technical understanding the low level stuff.

-mkl