Music on data disc -- can't rip??

May 10, 2011 4:57 AM

How do I rip music from a data disc?

Hi. I bought, from Amazon, Jack Logan's BULK album on CD years ago; it's a 2-CD set. But the second CD is a data disc and will only play on stereo! I haven't been able to find a way to at least rip to computer to enjoy thru my better speakers, etc. Any help appreciated. I've never encountered a commercially available album using a data disc. Thanks.

posted by noelpratt2nd to Technology (6 answers total)

Try something like Isobuster. Load the disk into that and look to see what data is on there. You should see a list of files that are roughly the same size. These will be the songs. I seem to recall that Isobuster will list them as [filename].wav, so you should be able to see which is which easily.

Make you that you have autoplay disabled also, in case there is some software being loaded that will prevent you from ripping the tracks.
posted by Solomon at 5:11 AM on May 10, 2011 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: #1 - Is Isobuster freeware? I can only load the disc into this Dell lappy I have...
#2 - The disc doesn't open for exploration even from Computer. But under Properties the file system is CDFS -- don't know what that means. Nothing kicks in, no autoplay or anything. Just will play on my stereo, which these days is a boombox. Maybe I'll see if Roxio reads it...
posted by noelpratt2nd at 6:24 AM on May 10, 2011

Response by poster: Roxio is in Copy mode w/ the data disc inside but is only making scratchy sounds, and no indicator lets me know what's going on. I must've tried this before...
posted by noelpratt2nd at 6:34 AM on May 10, 2011

Just thought I'd let you know I have a copy of BULK with the same problem. My CD player is able to play disc #2 but my computer won't. Something else I noticed as well - my computer drive and Sony CD player both read the tracks of disc #2 beginning at track 25 (disc #1 has 24 tracks). It's interesting that the computer drive can identify the tracks (even the track times) but won't play them.
posted by davebush at 7:01 AM on May 10, 2011

Isobuster is freeware, but some sections of it are limited. I'm not sure which ones as I have the paid version.

CDFS is CD File System.
posted by Solomon at 10:16 AM on May 10, 2011

It's not really a "data" disc, but a "regular" audio CD mastered in a way that violates the Red Book standard—at a minimum by starting with a track number other than 1, and possibly in other ways as well. Most standalone CD players don't care about these kinds of mastering problems—when you hit Play they just seek to where they think the first track is, start reading data, and display whatever track number is in the subcodes—but CD/DVD-ROM drives are generally pickier. Many of the CD copy-protection schemes that were in vogue a few years ago relied on this difference.

I have a similar disc (John Oswald's Plunderphonic 69/96) and was never able to get a clean rip of it, despite trying with several different rippers and a half-dozen different DVD and CD drives from a variety of manufacturers. There are probably drives out there that are smart enough to work through the intentional mastering errors (I did eventually source a clean FLAC version) but I don't know what models they are.

In a case like this I have absolutely no moral qualms about downloading an "illicit" copy.
posted by Lazlo at 1:00 AM on May 11, 2011 [1 favorite]