Maker Pro
Maker Pro

Copying "Soundtrack from the movie ..." CD

B

Bill Jeffrey

Jan 1, 1970
0
I bought a CD "Soundtrack from the Movie O Brother Where Art Thou". The
disc plays fine in the DVD/CD player connected to my TV. I would like
to make an audio CD copy to play in my car, but I'm having a LOT of trouble.

There are no recognizable audio files (i.e., *.mp3, etc) on the CD.
Windows Explorer tells me there are a number of other files, some of
which are executables (*.exe), as well as a huge one with a .DXR suffix.
I imagine this is where the audio is stored, but I can't be sure.

On my computer, I can play the first 17 (of the 19) tracks using Winamp
5.08. I can also rip these tracks, and then later play the ripped
files. The ripped files on my hard drive have an .m4a extension. But
my computer won't play or rip tracks 18 or 19 - midway through the 18th
track, it hangs up hard, and I have to pull the power cord to get
control back. It won't even begin to rip the 19th track.

I guess I could plug the analog audio output from the DVD/CD player into
my computer's sound card and capture it there, but this annoys me. And
I would like to know what is happening.

Anyone got any info? Thanks.

Bill
 
D

Dan

Jan 1, 1970
0
Some cd's come with "bonus" files, games you can play on a pc, etc.
That's probably what the .exe & .dxr and other unknown files are.
Typically, when you simply view a commercial music cd containing only
music in WE, you see a number of .cda files of 1k size, one for each
tune. You need to rip the cd; you can't just copy its contents and
expect it to play on a cd player (car, etc). If you just want to clone
the disk, rip to .wav files (uncompressed, not mp3's etc). I use Exact
Audio Copy for this, obtainable free here http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
You then burn the files using any number of programs; I use Nero
Express. BTW I have a copy of this very disk I got from the library,
been awhile, don't recall if the original had any non-audio nonsense on
it, but the copy plays fine. There's no doubt a way to clone all the
contents (mixed audio/data), but some commercial cd's are actually too
large to fit on a cd-r in their entirety, again I don't recall if this
was the case with the disk in question.


Dan
 
B

Bill Jeffrey

Jan 1, 1970
0
Thanks, Dan. Yes, according to the label, this "enhanced CD features
links and exclusive 3D screensaver" - and I have no interest in them.
But there are no .cda files that I can see. There is a directory called
"Saver" containing a single file called ss_setup.exe, undoubtedly the
screensaver - and another directory called "Xtras" (which will not
open). There are also 8 files with types .ini, .exe., .inf, .dxr, .db.,
..df. But nothing that sounds like an audio file. And although I was
aware of the existence of .cda files on an audio CD, I never knew where
the actual audio is saved.

The odd thing is that when I insert the disc, the CD drive "pumps" - rev
up to full speed, hold for about a second, rev back down to zero, pause
for a second, and repeat. Forever.

Puzzling. I'll try Exact Audio Copy and let you know. Thanks.

Bill
---------------------
 
D

Dan

Jan 1, 1970
0
Interesting. I don't look at each disk's files before ripping it
(generally no need to), but in terms of the audio files themselves I
can't recall any containing anything other than .cda's. A very good
source of info which should answer any questions is
http://www.cdrfaq.org/ The NP alt.music.mp3 can be a good source too,
been a while since I looked at the group, but generally there's a fairly
high smart-ass contingent there which rears its ugly head for
particularly newbie inquiries...

Good luck,

Dan
 
D

Daremo

Jan 1, 1970
0
Back in the Way Back, when using Win9X, one feature I liked about using Nero
(Full version) was that after installing Nero, there was another context
menu when you right-clicked on the CD drive. It read "Volumes" and let you
switch between the data volume and the audio volume. When I was pulling
tracks from multiple CDs in Nero it wouldn't list the songs on mixed-mode
CDs until I did this. I just checked in XP Pro, and I don't have the
option. I also don't have a mixed-mode CD handy either...

Daremo
 
B

Bill Jeffrey

Jan 1, 1970
0
I have finally managed to rip the audio from the CD, and burn audio CD
copies. I don't have a definitive answer to the original problem, but
in thanks to those who were kind enough to try to help, I'll tell you
what finally worked.

To review, the original was a mixed CD, audio and data. I tried ripping
the audio using several different (but not elaborate) programs. These
included Winamp, Windows Media Player, MusicMatch Jukebox, AudioGrabber,
Sonic, and Exact Audio Copy. All of them ripped tracks 1-17 without
problem, but stumbled on tracks 18 and 19. Some of them simply froze on
18, requiring a machine reboot. Some went into an endless loop of
spinning the drive up and then coasting it back to zero, then repeating.
Some gave error messages, some did not. One was smart enough to
switch into an analog backup recording mode, but still couldn't finish
the track that way.

My machines (I tried 2, nearly identical) have what is apparently a
rather generic CD-ROM drive, listed as "HL-DT-ST CD-ROM GCR-8483B" in
the device manager. This is what I was using for ripping. The machines
also have Sony CRX216E CD-RW drives. I have always been told that CD-RW
drives are fussier, and not really appropriate for mixed mode or for
ripping, but in desperation I finally tried it. Most of the software
packages listed above still had problems, but using the Sony CD-RW
drive, plain old Music Match Jukebox 9.0 was able to pull a good copy
after only a little bit of stumbling. Once I had ripped a good copy to
my hard drive, burning was easy.

So what was going on? I have no idea.

Thanks for those who tried to help me.

Bill
-----------------
 
Top