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Reading from audio CD to a file


Klitos Kyriacou

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Hi,

 

I'm a newbie with ImgBurn and these forums. Please excuse me if my question already has an answer, but I couldn't find it.

 

I recently bought a CD which causes the CD player in my hi-fi system to jump in a couple of places. However, the CD drives in both of my computers seem to read it and play it without any apparent problems. So, I thought I could fix this issue by creating an exact copy of the CD and using the copy in my hi-fi CD player instead of the original jumpy CD.

 

Step 1, I used ImgBurn to create CUE and BIN files, and did this on each of my two computers.

 

Then I compared the two BIN files thus produced. They were totally different! I mean, they had the same file size, but apart from that, they were really totally different, not just the odd byte here and there, but in fact most bytes throughout the whole file were totally different.

 

Can someone explain to me how this can be? I understand that the CD format contains error correction information. Is this not used to ensure that the data on the CD is bit-perfect? Why is it that data CDs (i.e. ISO) are bit-perfect, but audio CDs are not? After all, they both use the same physical recording techniques, even if they do use different data formats.

 

Also, can you confirm that I'm using the correct file type to write to. I wrote to CUE and BIN files, but it seems I could have created a .IMG file instead. Which type is best? All I want to do is create a new CD-R disc from the image, again using ImgBurn, so I'm not concerned with compatibility with any other software.

 

Thanks

Klitos

Edited by Klitos Kyriacou
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Drives read audio sectors with different offsets (byte 1 might be byte 20 from another drive), so although it might appear that the files are totally different, they're probably the same if you look ahead or behind a certain number of bytes.

 

BIN and CUE is correct for Audio CDs, that's why the program defaults to it. Essentially though, the 'bin' bit is just a file extension and could be replaced by img. The data in the file is identical.

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Drives read audio sectors with different offsets (byte 1 might be byte 20 from another drive), so although it might appear that the files are totally different, they're probably the same if you look ahead or behind a certain number of bytes.

 

Thanks Lightning! Does this mean that the BIN create I created is drive-specific? In other words, if I copy the BIN file to my other computer and burn a CD-R from it, will the CD-R be incorrectly written because the data will be offset from the original?

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No, not drive specific.

 

You end up losing tiny fractions of a second if the drive's read offset isn't cancelled out by its write offset, that's all.

 

Liteon drives seem to produce proper duplicates without any messing around.

 

For others, if you're really fussed about those tiny fractions of a second, use something like EAC with the correct offsets.

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