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Topic: EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode (Read 21308 times) previous topic - next topic
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EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

All right, I searched the forum, but I didn't come across anything to help me with this, so here goes...

I'd like to make a perfect copy of a CD-Extra CD (mixed mode, audio + data).  I always use EAC (properly configured) to securely copy audio CDs with "Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet" and then burn the image with EAC, but this method leaves out the data tracks when copying CD-Extras.  I could use Nero to perform a disc copy, but then I lose the benefits of secure copying the audio with EAC (unless this isn't an issue if I'm not ripping the audio, but copying the disc RAW??), don't I?  For that matter, is Nero's "disc copy" feature even a perfect data image copy, or does it just rewrite the file structure?  Do I need to use RAW mode?

So, any ideas on the best way to copy a CD-Extra while maintaining both the integrity of the audio session and the original file structure of the data session?  Perhaps I can manually combine two image files (one EAC and one Nero Disc Copy) into one by manually editing a CUE sheet?

In case it matters, my burner is a Lite-On DVDRW SOHW-832S.

Thanks for you help.

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #1
I don't make it too difficult,
I copy the audio with eac following www.high-quality.ch.vu , and the data files I copy with total commander from the cd to the album folder.

hm, if you burn later from the compressed audio a cd-r, you could use nero, drag n drop the waves into the nero window, set the gaps in nero to 0 s, besides the 1st track, which needs 2 s, to be CDDA/red book compatible. then drop the data files in appropriate window.

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #2
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think that's quite what I'm looking for.  Well, maybe I'm just being picky about it, but isn't there a way to get a nice 1:1 sector-for-sector copy onto CD-R from a CD-Extra?  I'd like to avoid remastering the data portion.

[span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%']Edit: added last sentence.[/span]

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #3
Quote
For that matter, is Nero's "disc copy" feature even a perfect data image copy, or does it just rewrite the file structure?  Do I need to use RAW mode?

[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=278371"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


That's a thing i'd also love to know - any specialists who can tell?

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #4
The only thing you should be worried about is ripping audio data. Audio CDs have no error correction built into them. Hence, extracting audio from CDs requires special software like EAC. However, data on any CD has no such problems. You can simply copy the files using your file browser.

Some CD Extras have some files which cannot be copied for some reason. Even if you skip these files, you can enjoy the "Extra" portion of the CD without any problems.

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #5
Quote
You can simply copy the files using your file browser.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=278559"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

While this will often be "good enough" to copy the data portion of the CD-Extra, certain structures will be lost: for example, many CD-Extras offer both Mac and PC formats in their data portions.  If I simply copied the files over on my Windows machine, I would lose the Mac stuff.  While this might seem minor, the fact remains that the copy is no longer a proper backup of the original.

I agree completely that the audio portion is of the greatest concern, but I'd also like to preserve the data portion exactly like (or transparently close enough to) the original disc.  Some sort of combination of EAC for the audio and a straight image copy for the data seems like the proper approach to me, but I have no idea how to go about this.  (...although I'm playing around with various ideas on a CD-RW at the moment to test out possibilities.)

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #6
My recipe for cooking Audio+CDExtra:

EAC: Image-copy of audio to wav+cue
NERO: Copy Data-Track to Image-File

1. Burn Audio-CD from image, but don't close CD
2. Burn with Nero the Data-Track as new session to the same CD

Buon Appetito
.halverhahn

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #7
I have been using IsoBuster to create an image of Session 2 (which is the data track.)  I have yet to try an recreate the CD by burning the cue sheet and then burning the second session but I hope that would create as close to an exact copy as possible.

Please correct me if I'm wrong!

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #8
is it true, that windows(2k, xp) does't show the data content of MAC files on CDs?

if it is about windows (and currently neglecting any mac file copy probs), my above described method has only 1 little disadvantage, of losing the correct write offset, if u burn by nero. But this isn't so important.

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #9
Quote
I have been using IsoBuster to create an image of Session 2 (which is the data track.)  I have yet to try an recreate the CD by burning the cue sheet and then burning the second session but I hope that would create as close to an exact copy as possible.

Please correct me if I'm wrong![a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=278583"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I tried this exact same method myself, and it worked fine except for when it came time to burn the image of Session 2.  I tried with Nero, burnatonce, and CDRWIN, and none worked.  As far as I can tell, I think the problem is that the Session 2 image is in a format meant to be burned as a complete disc image, so none of the burning programs wanted to write the image to an open multisession CD.  Perhaps I didn't extract the image using the right settings in IsoBuster, but I'm pretty sure I tried them all.

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #10
Quote
My recipe for cooking Audio+CDExtra:

EAC: Image-copy of audio to wav+cue
NERO: Copy Data-Track to Image-File

1. Burn Audio-CD from image, but don't close CD
2. Burn with Nero the Data-Track as new session to the same CD

Buon Appetito[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=278564"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Ah, fantastic!  Thank you, .halverhahn!!  This seems to work almost perfectly.  By using Nero's "Save Track" feature (which I never even knew existed!), Nero will save an image in .nrg format that it will then be willing (although begrudgingly  ) to append to an open multisession audio disc (from EAC), which I couldn't get IsoBuster to create (in any format) at all.  The result is a pretty darn perfect copy with the original CD structure preserved, as far as I can measure (with one peculiar, but insignificant exception -- see below).

It took me a bit to figure out the specifics from your description, so I'll share a detailed step-by-step process for everyone's reference:

Copying a CD-Extra: Getting all the benefits of both secure audio ripping and data image copying

Tools used:
- Exact Audio Copy 0.95 prebeta 5
- Nero Burning ROM 6.6.0.8
- IsoBuster 1.7 (for verification procedure only)
- Hex Workshop 4.23 (for verification procedure only)

Creating the copy CD-R:
1. Use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to "Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet"/Alt+F7/[IMG button] from the source CD-Extra disc.  Of course, make sure EAC is properly configured for secure ripping (which I won't explain here).  I happen to have offset correction configured for my drive, but I only mention that because it will affect the results of the verification procedure below.  Whether or not you offset correct is up to you... I'm not opening that can of worms here.
2. In Nero, go to "Extras->Save Tracks"/F9 and select the source drive.  Don't bother with getting Artist and Title information here; any such data gathered will not be used in the copy (it will come from EAC).  Select the data track (the last track) and only this track, pick a path in which to save the track image, and hit "GO".  You should end up with a file named something like "Track No12.nrg" or whatever the track number was.
3. If using the same drive for ripping and burning, at this point eject the source disc and put in a blank.
4. Use "Tools->Write CD-R" in EAC to burn the audio image (WAV) to a brand new disc.  Load the CUE Sheet made in Step 1 and select "CD-R->Write CD".  Make sure that the option "Close mode" is set to "Leave CD open" so that the data session can be added later.  "Make It So" and let EAC do it's thing.
5. In Nero, go to "Recorder->Burn Image" and select the data image (NRG) created in Step 2.  Make sure "Finalize CD" is checked and that "Write method" is set to "Track-at-once".  The "Disc-at-once" mode (by definition) will not work for this multisession burn.
6. Nero will now yell at you: "The disc you have inserted is not empty, but the writing mode of your compilation is 'Start multisession' or 'No multisession'.  This will cause the information already on the disc to be inaccessible via Windows Explorer.  Should Nero proceed with writing to this disc?"  Select "Yes" and let the disc burn.  (Incidentally, this makes sense if you think about it: on a real CD-Extra, you cannot access the audio tracks in Explorer or play the disc in a software player expecting to find CDA files.)
7. At the end of the burn, hit "Done" and viola!  You should now have a copy of the original CD-Extra that is accurate in replication of both the audio and the data.



Verifying the burn against the original:
(a.k.a. "Being anal about it")
There are a whole bunch of caveats to throw out here, including the fact that this method is flawed in a few ways: use/non-use of offset correction will alter results, the audio in the IsoBuster-made image of the original might be inaccurate (that's why we bothered using EAC in the first place!), subchannel data is not taken into consideration (but it won't match anyway and who cares -- I "improved" my copy with CD-Text data anyway), and probably a few other problems.
So that being said, I personally don't intend to go through this particular "verification procedure" after every CD-Extra copy I make.  Actually, I will probably never do it again, and I don't really recommend this procedure to anyone else to use casually.  I'm only presenting it here as a proof-of-concept for the above copying procedure, with my primary goal being to see how well the original structure of the CD-Extra was preserved.

In summary, I used IsoBuster to create BIN/CUEs from both the source disc and the copy by right-clickin the highest level in the tree and selecting "Extract CD <image> -> RAW (*.bin, *.iso)".  One difference between the copy and original that immediately became apparent was that creating an image from the original produced no errors, but creating an image from the copy caused an error on each of the final two sectors of the disc, and only these final two sectors.  The error said:

Unreadable sector
Sector 174580 couldn't be read
Error : 05/64/00

All read retries failed, and this final two sector glitch was reproducible on all burns on all media attempted (although I only tested this one particular source disc).  The IsoBuster help file defines error code 05/64/00 as "Illegal mode for this track", which leads me to believe that Nero messes something up in recording the data session.  Perhaps Nero finalized the disc in Mode 1 for some reason?  Anyone have any guesses?  On the image of the original disc, these last two sectors were completely filled with zeros, so no big loss, and actually, things come out perfect if you tell IsoBuster to "Replace with User Data All zeros" for each of the two sectors.  I don't know enough about CD data structures to know what the significance of the final two sectors would be, and more importantly, if one can always expect to find them filled with nulls.  Can anyone help me out with that?  Anything to worry about?  Is there any reason to expect that this would ever result in any real data corruption?

Anyway, I compared the original and copy's generated CUE Sheets, and though they were superficially different, all indices were identical, including the ones for the Session 1 lead-out and the Session 2 data track.  For some reason, INDEX 00's didn't show up on the CUE produced by IsoBuster for the original, but did for the copy, which is pretty great.  I verified that they were the correct INDEX 00's by getting a "second opinion" CUE Sheet of the original from EAC.  The CD-Text differed between the original and copy, which was intentional.

As for the RAW data, I loaded the BIN files for both the original and copy into Hex Workshop and used "Tools->Compare->Compare Files" to perform a bit-for-bit comparison between them (which can take a bit, considering the size of the data).  The copy BIN matched the original BIN 100%, bit-for-bit.  Please note that I'm not saying that I created a "bit-perfect copy".  For starters, the subchannel data hasn't been considered, and it is definitely different (CD-Text added).  Plus, it is possible, although unlikely, that the audio data could differ between the source and copy, and that the images only match because of read errors during IsoBuster's extraction of the audio session (and that these errors happened to produce the same bit patterns), but seriously... I trust that the copy's audio is an accurate copy because I used EAC to make it.  Plus, with this particular source CD, EAC reported 100% track quality, so I would expect the IsoBuster image audio data to match.  I should note also that I used offset correction in EAC when making the copy; if I hadn't, the audio data would probably be shifted a bit from the original in the copy, and Hex Workshop would not have reported an exact match.  Also, remember the final two sectors glitch encountered above: the only reason the copy BIN matches the original BIN in the last 0x1260 bytes (2 * 2352 decimal) is because I told IsoBuster to "Replace with User Data All zeros" and the source CD happened to contain null data here.  Again, if someone could tell me if the last two sectors will always happen to contain null data, or if someone could explain the source of this error, I would greatly appreciate it.

One final caveat: I only tested this procedure with a single source disc.  It's not good practice to generalize based on a single successful result, so I'd be interested to see if equally good results are obtained with other CD-Extra discs.  I happened to use The Shins Oh, Inverted World as the sole source in this test.  I liked this disc as an example because it is short and the data portion is a hyrid of HFS and ISO/Joliet file systems (so simply remastering the data session in a "drag-n-drop" way in any Windows-based burning program would have destroyed the HFS data and changed the CD structure).

Anyway, I think that should do it.  Any suggestions/comments/corrections are welcome.  Thanks.

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #11
I wanted to do basically the same thing, but from linux.  I wanted the audio in a playable format and the data in some sort of image that I could reburn if I wanted to.  I could mount the data track and copy the files, but not create an image.  There was no linux software capable of copying an iso or any other image of the data track (normally you'd just use dd to copy /dev/hdc or whatever, but that wouldn't work for mixed mode CDs).

So, I wrote some software to do it.  The ISO it creates isn't directly mountable because the directory structure in the ISO refers to the absolute sectors on the CD, not from the start of the ISO.  But it should work if you burn it again to the CD with the iso as the second session, which is what I want (and some ISO unpacking programs have options for correcting for that offset, so I can get the files out of it if I want).  I could modify the directory structure of the ISO to make it normal, but you'd need to change it back before you could burn it as the second session, so I didn't do that.

You can create a single disc image in linux with cdrdao that includes both the audio and the data that you can burn back again, but it's not a playable audio format and it's not a useable ISO because it's raw CD sectors.
I am *expanding!*  It is so much *squishy* to *smell* you!  *Campers* are the best!  I have *anticipation* and then what?  Better parties in *the middle* for sure.
http://www.phong.org/

 

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #12
I know...  A thread that is over 2 years old...  But I have questions as I have restarted my archiving effort and have run into some discs with CD-Extra content.

@phong:  I'm a windows user, so could I run your extricate program in a virtual machine running Ubuntu and save the resulting ISO to burn later with windows software should I ever have to recreate my CD?

Also, regarding ven42's solution, can any of the freeware alternatives to Nero be used in this manner?  I've been Nero free for years and I don't want to go back!

In the alternate, have any new methods been developed that successfully result in files that you can burn back to CD?

Thanks all!

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #13
Sorry I had to resurrect this one too, but I'm having some issues here...

I successfully burned the audio session using Burrrn and a wavpack file with embedded cue sheet, and left the disc open.

Now, trying to burn the data session with burnatonce, I get the following error:

ERROR: Drive does not accept any cue sheet variant -
ERROR: Writing failed.


What am I doing wrong here??

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #14
It means that your drive dosen't support the cuesheet which cdrdao.exe has generated and sent to the drive via the SEND CUE SHEET command in SAO writing mode(There is no such thing as a DAO writing mode in the MMC specs, but DAO just reffers to a uninterupted SAO write with the disc closed afterwards). Anyway, I would recommend that you do what .halverhahn recommended previously in this thread and which is to use Nero to make the image of the data track(Extras > Save tracks) and to write the image to an appendable CD-R with Nero in TAO writing mode.

Don't use IsoBuster to make the image, since it dosen't reallocate the filesystem and which means that you cannot extract any data out of the image file later on if wanted with apps like IsoBuster and also since you cannot write such unreallocated images to appendable CD-Rs with Nero + many other apps either. I'm not a Nero fan myself, but i have to use it(v6.6.0.18 as it uses lower RAM than later v6.6 versions during writing) for CD-Extra tasks, since it handles that in a very nice manner. What i mean is that when extracting only the data track from the second session into an image file, then that image file will, if not being reallocated, be pointing to invalid references, since the image now sees the data track as being on the first and only session, whereas it's filesystem references are fixed to be on the second session and this is what Nero adjusts on-the-fly both during reading and writing the image...

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #15
If anybody should be wondering about the two blocks with read errors that ven42 where talking about previously in this thread, then i just found this in IsoBuster's help file :

"Errors on a disc are not necessarily always a problem.  They might be located in areas where there is no useful user data.
E.g. sectors that are 'often' unreadable, depending on the media and the way the tracks were written :
- The last two run-out blocks of a session"

Source : http://www.smart-projects.net/help.php?help=840

Btw, Nero dosen't report those two blocks as containing errors when reading back from the copy, even though the reading is done in cooked mode...

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #16
Are there any other programs than Nero that can rearrange the sector references in the image? I can't get Nero to even read the data track here, it just says:
Quote
One or more data tracks of this disc cannot be stored into an image file, because they don't start at the beginning of the disc or because they have been written in packet writing mode.

I just want a regular mountable ISO file, being able to burn it back to a CDR isn't important. Also, does anyone know if these absolute sector references only exist in the ISO 9660 file system, or does the Mac file system of some CD Extra discs have to be rearranged as well?

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #17
I where once testing out the newer Nero versions and when i tried to extract the second session data track from a CD-Extra release, then Nero wouldn't let me do it and gave an error message(i can't remember if it was the same message as the one you where getting, though). I always use v6.6.0.18, as i don't like v7 and i haven't looked at v8, since it's even more bloated than before... Maybe also the newer v6.6 versions will work i.e. v6.6.0.16(OEM), v6.6.1.4, v6.6.1.5 and v6.6.1.5c. I stick to v6.6.0.18, since the newer ones uses way to much RAM during writing(someone said v6.6.1.6 didn't, but then another one said it still did, but as i don't like using OEMs, then i didn't tested it out myself)...

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #18
Nero 6 won't install in Vista, so that's not an option. It did work in Nero 7 once before, but not anymore for some reason, so I hope there are other programs that can rearrange sector references.

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #19
Quote
My recipe for cooking Audio+CDExtra:

EAC: Image-copy of audio to wav+cue
NERO: Copy Data-Track to Image-File

1. Burn Audio-CD from image, but don't close CD
2. Burn with Nero the Data-Track as new session to the same CD

<snip><snip>


Is it possible to follow/adapt this recipe for mix-mode game CDs? I know there's an issue with copy-protected mix-mode game CDs, but let's assume the game CD is not copy-protected. But I don't just want another physical copy, I want an image file with flawless data & flawless AccurateRip/Paranoia sub-channel audio rip. The game data is track 1.

So I could use Nero to rip track 1 to do flawless data rip. Then use ExactAudioCopy or dBPowerAmp to do AccurateRip of the audio tracks as uncompressed WAVs. Then create a new Nero project/session and manually build the track 1 data, then append the AccurateRip WAVs. Then write to NRG image... then convert to BIN/CUE or CCD or MDS.

Good?

EAC and CD-Extras/Mixed mode

Reply #20
Nero 6 won't install in Vista, so that's not an option. It did work in Nero 7 once before, but not anymore for some reason, so I hope there are other programs that can rearrange sector references.


Nero 6 can install under Vista/Win7. It just warns you that there's compatibility issues. But you can say ignore and continue. I installed Nero 6 and it worked fine. I made CD images and that also worked fine.

Vista/Win7 complains the same with many other old ancient programs.