Duplicate audio CD?

[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.

[muzines]

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.

[muzines]

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?

[ConcertinaChap]

Cost?

Precisely. So simple a task should be in the OS. Or so I thought.

CC

[Kwackman]

You're missing two things: CD-text (including such esoterica as ISRC codes) and inter-track spacing.

OK, although I'm pretty sure the inter track spacing can be adjusted, and track titles etc will be written to the CD. You got me on the ISRC though!

[CS70]

Just in case I was too cryptic, Nero is the name of a software which used to be one of the go-to when ripping was common. Once you have an ISO image you should be able to burn it directly on another disk.

Obviously you cannot make actual CDs at home, only burn CD-R and CD-RW but that you know already.

[muzines]

Just in case I was too cryptic, Nero is the name of a software which used to be one of the go-to when ripping was common. Once you have an ISO image you should be able to burn it directly on another disk.

Yes, but Nero was PC only. Toast was the Mac equivalent. And yes, there are ways to make images and reburn that, I've used disk utility and other tools for these purposes a lot, but CC says this didn't work for him, and I can't check at the moment...

The best I can suggest right now without committing myself to investigate (too much on my plate right now to do that) is to google around and see what suggestions come up. It's not that this can't be done, it's that CC is unwilling to pay the required cost for a set of tools that easily solve that problem, so will have to sniff around for some less easy but much cheaper tools, which I'm sure exist...

[CS70]

Yeah, just helpful n case CC’s got a pc available..

[ConcertinaChap]

I've used Nero back in my PC days, but it's a cost option that would be difficult to justify even if it ran on Macs, like Toast and the rest.

Desmond, thanks for the thought but I'd prefer you not to spend time on it even if you had the time free. It's not worth it for 15 CDs. I'll set it up in Quattro and then if my friend wants more I'll be able to do it without effort. I was just hoping there was something obvious and easy that I was missing, but seemingly not.

Thanks all,

CC

[The Elf]

CC is on a Mac.

Ah...

[James Perrett]

When I was more heavily involved with CD Burning technology it was interesting that much of the software was written by a small clique of mostly German software engineers who were mainly PC based. You'd find the same names involved with all sorts of different companies. That's probably why all of the free or cheap software is PC only.

[paul tha other]

dosnt waveburner do this?? it used to come with logic ,dunno if it still does but could you not import the disc image as a ddp or something and burn from the images ,hopefuly retaining the cd text etc??

[muzines]

You haven’t been able to run Waveburner for years. I think Sierra was the last OS that would run on, or possibly the one before...

And no, copying CDs was not what Waveburner did anyway...