SOUND ON SOUND

[ConcertinaChap]

Hi,

A friend of mine has asked me to make a few copies of a CD of his (no copyright issues, the music is written and performed by him and the studio that first created the CD is long gone). I have two CD burners as it happens and so you'd think there would be an easy way of duplicating the CD from one to the other but extensive googling hasn't revealed it to me. I could, of course, load the CD into iTunes and write it out from there, but wouldn't that lose the CD text and custom pauses between tracks?

Anyway, I appeal to the hive mind, am I missing something obvious?

N.B. If you right click on the "Audio CD" icon you are offered an option to Burn Audio CD to disk ... which results in an unplayable copy for some reason :(

CC

[Kwackman]

I could, of course, load the CD into iTunes and write it out from there, but wouldn't that lose the CD text and custom pauses between tracks?

Mybe, but maybe not!
Ask iTunes to import it in.
If you're lucky, it might recognise and name the tracks, if you're unlucky you'll need to rename each track along with the Album's title & artist.
On the "Make audio CD" or whatever it's called in iTunes, there is (or there was!) an option to decide the gap between tracks, if you select "0 seconds", the original gaps should be there?
I'm frequently wrong on these matters, so.......

[James Perrett]

I see a few options listed on Stack Overflow but most seem to involve the command line. The suggestion of Cdrdao looks the most likely to work.

[ConcertinaChap]

Not too afraid of the commandline so I'll have a shufty. Making a bitwise copy from one burner to another really shouldn't be that difficult, should it?

Does iTunes import ISRC codes and CD data like that?

Cheers,

CC

Update: Cdrdao hasn't been built for MacOS, so if I wanted to use it I'd have to download the source and compile. Life's a little bit too short for that for the sake of 15 CDs. Good thought, though.

[desmond]

No, iTunes won't clone an Audio CD.

There are tools like Toast which will copy CD's, or you should be able to disk image the CD and burn a copy...

[ConcertinaChap]

Thanks, Desmond. I've been trying that and throwing away the resulting CDs which CD players wouldn't recognise. Toast, it seems, currently costs £75. Again, a bit overkill for just 15 CDs.

Hey ho, my fallback is ripping the tracks using iTunes and then using DSP-Quattro to set up a CD creation project with appropriate CD Text and intervals. That will definitely work but I was hoping there was an easier way.

Cheers,

CC

[Hugh Robjohns]

Won't Windows media player allow you to rip and burn files between drives? It's a very long time since I've used it, but I have a feeling it will support that type of activity if you have two optical drives attached to the computer ...

...but I may be completely wrong on this!

[The Elf]

There used to be oodles of programs that could copy CDs. It's been many moons since I needed to use one, but I feel sure they must still be out there.

How about the good old 'CloneCD'?

You certainly don't need iTunes (gawd forbid!). When I'm ripping CDs I use EAC (Exact Audio Copy), which works very well. At the least you could use that, then reconstruct a new audio CD using the resulting wav files.

[James Perrett]

Won't Windows media player allow you to rip and burn files between drives?

There are plenty of programs that will let you do this on Windows but CC is on a Mac. You need to be careful with general purpose programs like Windows Media Player as it may not preserve all the data. Probably better to go for something like Exact Audio Copy.

Just one thought to CC - do you have a copy of Sonoris DDP Creator? According to its feature list it supports CD import and burning. Hofa's DDP creation software also seems to support it too.

[desmond]

There's plenty of Mac stuff but it's dwindled as the use of CD's has dwindled and the Mac has moved on, and as a consequence of once using this stuff quite a lot, I don't have the names of the stuff I used to use to hand, other than Toast, and other stuff that no longer works (like Waveburner etc).

I can't remember if MacOS's disk utility can do this, and to be honest, I'd have to find an audio CD and connect up my optical drive to check. But yes, there should be utilities that can image a disk and re-burn it easily enough, if you want to avoid ripping to audio files and then burning those (which isn't the same as cloning the CD).

[ConcertinaChap]

Disk Utility can't, sadly. The issue seems to be that the facilities that currently come with MacOS are unhappy with anything that doesn't have a file system. Audio CDs have a standardised format, of course, but it's not recognised by MacOS as a file system.

I've got Hofa DDP Player which I use for checking the output of Quattro when generating DDP images. So I can see how Hofa DDP Burn would do the trick, but it costs money. Sonoris costs quite a lot of money. This makes both of them (and Toast) uneconomic when I'm being asked to make just 15 copies at a quid each (as a favour).

So there doesn't seem to be a straightforward/cheap way of copying audio CDs on a Mac. I'll do it, as I say, by recreating the CD in DSP Quattro. More work than I was expecting but at least no extra expense.

Thanks all,

CC

[Kwackman]

I now I'm missing something obvious, but why not just make the CD from iTunes?
Create a playlist and burn to audio disc.

[ConcertinaChap]

You're missing two things: CD-text (including such esoterica as ISRC codes) and inter-track spacing. I can reproduce all that stuff using DSP Quattro (my current equivalent of the late and lamented Waveburner) but it will take work and I'm still finding it baffling that producing a simple duplicate of an audio CD when you've got two CD drives to hand should be so difficult.

CC

[CS70]

Nero?

[Sam Spoons]

Cost? :blush: